ABSTRACT
In 2002, Spain was ranked as the tenth largest economy of the world, 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 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 semiperipheral, 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 underinvestment and a low capacity of research and development. The factors contributing to this state of affairs are manifold. Nevertheless, one major factor is cultural. The Spanish economy is extremely adversarial to a business enterprise culture. In spite of major improvements in the 1990s, the productivity of the Spanish economy is still one of the lowest of the European Union in all sectors. In the past two and a half decades, Spanish governments tried to improve the economy by flexibilising the labour market, while they tended to neglect the necessary structural transformation of the agricultural, industrial and services sector. Spain is also lagging behind in pushing forward the new information technologies. This chapter intends to give a general overview of the problems of the Spanish economy, which in the end are linked to any political ambitions that the country may have domestically or internationally.
