MADRID (Reuters) -Spain will raise its 2025 economic growth forecast to 2.9% from 2.7% and plans to include inequality reduction among its macroeconomic targets, El Pais newspaper said on Monday.
The government had already upgraded this year’s growth forecast to 2.7% from 2.6%, predicting a positive outlook until 2028 for Europe’s fastest-growing advanced economy.
The economy ministry declined to comment on the GDP forecasts and the new inequality metric.
Officials are finalising the data that will be used to develop a new indicator, which will establish short- and medium-term poverty and inequality forecasts.
Eurostat figures cited by the newspaper show 13.6% of the Spanish population, about 6.7 million people, lived in poverty in 2024, up from 11.3% in 2023.
Though the social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is beginning to subside, poverty and extreme social exclusion in Spain have worsened since the 2008 global financial crisis and doubled among children, according to a study issued last week by the Foessa Foundation, which is linked to Caritas, the Catholic Church’s charity.
According to the study, neither the post-crisis boom until 2018 nor the period following the pandemic managed to improve the situation, with the level of extreme social exclusion rising to 8.8% of Spain’s population from 6.3% in 2007.
The research measured social exclusion by analysing household income and access to housing, education, and healthcare. The housing crisis is the main cause of social exclusion in Spain and has worsened since 2021, affecting one in four people in the country, the study said.
(Reporting by Corina Pons and Jesus Aguado, editing by Charlie Devereux, Aidan Lewis)
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