ABSTRACT
In 2006, Spain was ranked as the eighth-largest economy of the world based on GDP, although it is still characterised by levels of asymmetrical dependency on the developments in the global economy and other major economies of the world. One of the reasons is that Spain has still a very inefficient agricultural and industrial sector, and the services sector is still lagging behind that of most other developed countries. It belongs to a category of countries that neither belong to the periphery, nor to the centre of the global economy. They are semi-peripheral, because they have still many peripheral forms of production and struggle to keep up technologically with the more advanced economies. In spite of being a member of the European Union, Spain continues to suffer from chronic under-investment and a low capacity of research and development.
