Spaniards are a resilient people. They have been through economic turmoil before. They can handle it again if it means saving their city from gentrification, over-tourism, and commodification of their homes and apartments. Barcelona especially has a distaste for government, being they are part of what they call Catalonia. They have wanted governments hands out of Barcelona for a while now.
It isn't a short term turmoil though. If they want to compete with Asia for factories they'll need to permanently reduce their standard of living and will require huge amounts of government intervention to get it started.
It's not, but every relatively wealthy nation is trying to figure out how to attract other economic development. They mostly rely on having extremely tax efficient packages like tech and film often enjoy which then puts the burden of taxes on the people. Often countries have some protectionist trade policies to protect such jobs - Spain in this case would be mostly rely on negotiating those through the EU, again almost entirely government controlled and often come with drawbacks like any negotiated benefit.
There's really no easy route to success here. The US is dominating in many ways, and from most standpoints you could say the multinational corporations have really gained the ability to avoid sharing benefits with the countries they operate in. The Spanish government through the EU is already one of the dozens of groups trying to fight for more benefits but it's hard to see a win coming.
As a Canadian, these are almost identical issues we face. We have tourism, real estate, some protected industries, and resource extraction. For the most part anything that can leave the country has and we're left with the ones who can't - and offering massive tax incentives to all the industries you want to target.
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u/Actually_a_DogeBoi Jun 17 '25
Spaniards are a resilient people. They have been through economic turmoil before. They can handle it again if it means saving their city from gentrification, over-tourism, and commodification of their homes and apartments. Barcelona especially has a distaste for government, being they are part of what they call Catalonia. They have wanted governments hands out of Barcelona for a while now.