Spain: The World's Best Performing Rich Economy

"A decade after the country was written off as a basket case," said The Times, Spain is enjoying "a new age of prosperity".

Tibidabo, Barcelona

It's definitely a case of Viva España as The Economist named Spain as the world's best-performing rich economy. The country's GDP expanded by an impressive 3.5% in the last quarter of 2024, "outstripping official forecasts and far outperforming its eurozone peers", said Reuters. By contrast, the UK economy grew by just 1.7% over the same period, with France recording 1%, Italy 0.6%, and Germany only managing 0.1%. America's GDP growth in last year's final quarter was 2.3%.

Key to Spain's economic resurgence has been "the government's strikingly different approach to migration", said The Guardian. Unlike his counterparts in the rest of Europe, Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has pursued a liberal immigration policy, saying that the choice was "between being an open and prosperous country or a closed-off, poor country". As Spain has one of the lowest birth rates in the EU, only immigration could grow the economy and sustain the welfare state, he said - and he has been proved correct.

Spain's "strong export figures" and "robust consumption" have only been possible because of "the health of the country's labour market", said Euronews. Strikingly, of the 468,000 jobs created last year, only 59,000 (just under 13%) were taken by Spanish nationals.

Along side this, a whopping 94 million tourists visited Spain in 2024, helping fuel GDP growth that "represents about 13 percent of the economy", said The Times. Other factors behind Spain's boom include an "abundance of wind and solar renewables", which have "helped to keep energy relatively cheap", said The Guardian. The socialist-led government also "ran a deficit to fund initiatives, such as raising pensions and public sector hiring".

"If you get this combination, it's hard to beat," Javier Díaz-Giménez, a professor of economics at Barcelona's IESE Business School, told the paper.