Time to pay back: economic crisis in Spain

I have just read in Finantial Times the article High-flier must come down to earth about the financial crisis in Spain. Read it because it is worth doing it. I can only agree with it.

In the first place, Spain is a country where education is a mere ideological battlefield of the 2 big parties. I studied under the 1974 Education Law, based in traditional learning. In this system memory is paramount and you are rewarded according to your personal efforts. Unfortunately, this system lacks something very important, critical thinking. However, I think that in general terms did the job, it was at least acceptable. During the 1990s the Socialist Party brought about an ambitious education law called LOGSE (By the way, his creator was Javier Solana, former EU Foreign Affairs Representative and NATO general secretary). The LOGSE law tried to teach students how to teach critically. However it failed, as it was dragged by the habits of the old system and, on the other hand, to address effort as the principal mean for academic success. For instance, in the Secondary School you can automatically move on to the next stage after failing several subjects.  In addition, the right wing party, the PP, tried to implement its own law without consensus. As well as the LOGSE its law came with a certain ideological load. The law was born death because when they lose the election in 2003 the Socialists aborted it.  To accomplish the disaster the investment in education in Spain during all these years has been one of the lowest in the EU. Furthermore, Spanish universities are not competitive the least. I will not keep explaining to not extend this article too much. My conclusion is that education does not give votes, and because of this it has consciously relegated in the background. Now, in 2008-2010 we have realised this is one of our flaws. But I do not see the  Spanish politicians putting Education on the top of their agenda.

The second problem is the mamoneo (click to see the “definition”). Corruption in Spain not scandalous. In its last survey International Transparency says that Spain is the 32th most corrupted countries in the World. I believe this is correlative to the economic standards of the country (unlike Italy, 63th which is more corrupted than countries like Turkey, Cuba or Namibia). Despite this fact, I believe that public money expenditure is not very wise in some regards. I will give some examples:

1- The regions and the central government: with some exceptions such as Treasury and Foreign Affairs, policy-making in the Spanish State is mostly transferred to the regions (Healthcare, Education, Gender, etc.). However, sometimes occur that the decision-making is duplicated and , the expenditure is also duplicated… with taxpayer money, of course. For instance, we see that there is a ministry for housing when at the same time this competence belongs to the regions. And the same applies for Gender Affairs. And so on so forth.

2-There are more than 2.5M public servants in Spain (out of 45 M people). Actually, 1 out of 6 workers. Thinking about it: local administrations, provincial administrations, regional administrations, the State, the Army, the Police (national corps and regional ones in some cases-sometimes occurring like in the former example). Half a million are in the region f Andalusia. In Extremadura they account more than 20% of the working population.

- Nationalists dreams at the cost of the tax payer: in some places, like Catalonia, the regional government has opened regional embassies in many countries to promote whatever they please. In the Basque they used to do something similar but since the nationalists were defeated this has stop to continue.

But despite all our problems, it is also true that Spain is constantly underestimated. Few know that Spain is one of the most important economies in the World (Please look at this) or the 18th country in the World in technological achievement even before Italy. We already had many challenges and we overcame all of them and progressed. There are reasons for hope: our own capabilities.

It is matter of time. There is talent and money but an incapable Prime Minister, ZP-you only have  look at his poor record  and therefore there is insecurity and distrust. But people need a sign of hope. As soon as the latter comes back growth will follow its way.