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PRI had an interview with NYT reporter Steve Erlanger on the situation in Catalonia in which he said that Spain had pretty much recovered from the recession and debt crisis. That’s not what the data say.

According to the data from the OECD, the employment rate for prime-age workers (ages 25–54) is still down by almost 5 percentage points from its pre-crisis peak. For young people (ages 15–24), it has fallen by 20.0 percentage points from 39.4 percent to 19.4 percent. In the United States, this sort of drop off in employment rates would mean that an additional 10 million people are out of work.

This deterioration in the economy may have some connection to the unhappiness of the people in Catalonia with the Spanish government.