July 02, 2015
The introduction to a Morning Edition segment on the response in Spain (sorry, no link) told listeners that Spain was undergoing austerity to pay down its “massive debt.” This is inaccurate. Spain did not have anything that can be remotely described as massive debt before the austerity policies imposed on the country by its creditors.
Prior to the collapse of the country’s housing bubble, Spain’s debt to GDP ratio was 26 percent, just over one-third of the U.S. level. It was running surpluses of more than 2.0 percent of GDP, the equivalent of a budget surplus of roughly $350 billion a year in the United States. (Its worth noting that Greece’s debt to GDP ratio was a much more manageable 107 percent of GDP before the crisis and austerity pushed it to 170 percent of GDP.)
The segment also is a bit out of line with reality in touting Spain’s economic success under austerity. It boasted that Spain had the strongest growth in the euro zone. This is an extremely low bar. Spain’s growth rate did not cross 3.0 percent last year and is not projected to do so this year. By contrast, it averaged almost 4.0 percent in the last two years before the crash. Countries recovering from steep downturns are expected to have faster than normal growth.
According to the I.M.F.’s growth projections (which have consistently proven to be overly optimistic) Spain’s per capita income will not surpass its 2007 level until 2018. This is a considerably worse than the situation faced by the United States in the Great Depression. The OECD puts Spain’s unemployment rate at 22.7 percent as of April.
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