The health of the economy goes far beyond what is reflected in the growth rate, the most used indicator to measure the economic strength of countries. Aware that data are not sufficient to assess whether well-being affects all segments of the population, the Government will include poverty and inequality indicators in the macroeconomic table for the first time. This document, which includes the prospects for growth, employment and price behavior in the coming years, will be updated this Tuesday to include an upward revision of economic growth in 2025 (from 2.7% expected so far to 2.9%), but also to incorporate an indicator of reduction of inequalities among the macroeconomic objectives set by the Executive.
The Spanish economy is growing more than that of its European neighbors and its foundations are more solid than a few years ago. Gross domestic product (GDP) increased 3.5% in 2024 and the third quarter of 2025, the latest data available, the year-on-year improvement was 2.8%, following 3.1% and 3.0% in the first and second quarters. With this evolution, the Executive calculates that it is prudent to expect an economic progress of 2.9% on an annual basis for this year as a whole, as government sources explain to EL PAÍS, in line with what has been experienced in the cumulation of the first three quarters. The official update will come one day after the European Commission presents its autumn forecast this Monday, which will predictably improve that horizon as well.
Beyond this improvement, in line with what has already been carried out by various analysis houses in recent weeks, the Executive will introduce a significant innovation in the macro framework. Because these data hide gray areas. Some of the poverty and inequality indicators most used by researchers do not seem so favorable in terms of poverty and inequality levels, despite the general improvement in employment and wages in Spain. Starting from Tuesday, when the Council of Ministers presents the new macroeconomic table with the most updated forecasts up to 2028, the Government will have a new indicator that it will take into account from now on when developing its policies. The objective is to establish indices of inequality and poverty that allow us to evaluate the evolution “of this priority objective for the Government, that is, that the strong growth of the economy reaches everyone”, underline the sources consulted.
The Executive is finalizing the data that will be used to develop this indicator which will make it possible to establish forecasts on poverty and inequality in the short and medium term. While waiting to know the numbers of the macro picture, the latest data published in this area are not entirely encouraging. The most recent Eurostat statistics on persistent poverty reveal that in 2024 13.6% of the population suffered from it, which worsens the 2023 figure by more than two points (which was the best in the last 15 years), although it still represents progress compared to the 17.7% that skyrocketed with the pandemic. If you take only workers, the overall risk of poverty in Spain hits 11%, the third worst record in the community club, but the best Spanish figure in more than a decade, according to the European Statistics Agency.
Slightly more favourably, the Gini index, which measures the distribution of income among inhabitants with a methodology that assigns to each country a value between zero and 100 —zero would correspond to a situation in which all citizens had the same income and 100 if a single person put all incomes together—, assigns Spain a value of 31.2 in 2024, with a greater imbalance than the average of the Eurozone and the EU. With one exception in 2020, the indicator shows small improvements in Spain compared to 2015.
Even a different analysis, that of the survey on living conditions prepared by the National Institute of Statistics (INE), reflects a slight improvement in the percentage of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion: in 2024 it was equal to 25.8%, compared to 26.5% in 2023. However, these are very high percentages which lead to adopting measures to reduce the gap between those who do not make ends meet and the richest percentage of the population. And they live with an almost uninterrupted increase in the average income per family recorded since 2016, which reveals important improvements in some social strata that do not occur among the most disadvantaged.
With this reshaping of the macro framework to include these objectives, the government intends to impose a “self-discipline” mandate, according to sources consulted by this newspaper. The greater precariousness experienced today by groups of the population who have a job, but with low wages, and the growing difficulties in accessing housing plunge some groups into poverty, while others improve considerably. The combination of both realities results in GDP growth, but the percentage itself is limited to measuring the success of economic policy.
The Executive is uncomfortable that these statistics are sometimes interpreted as the most rigorous assessment of its work in tackling inequality. And it calls for forceful measures such as improving the minimum wage and introducing a decent minimum income as key elements to improve the situation of the most disadvantaged. At the same time, the Government is aware of the increase in income imbalances and the international trend that warns of the need to give priority to this reality and urges the creation of reliable indicators that measure it.
With this aim, last Friday a group of 500 economists and inequality experts asked world leaders by letter to develop a specific inequality indicator, inspired by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which is used as a reference in the fight against global warming. The signatories, including former US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and two of the world’s leading inequality theorists (the French Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman), argue that an institutional status must be given to this fight against income imbalances to engage states. The document echoes the recommendations of the recent G20 report on global inequality, the first specific report on the topic produced by this group of richer and developing economies, and which was prepared by Nobel Prize winner in economics Joseph Stiglitz.
Beyond the poverty and inequality objectives, the macro table, which also serves as the foundation stone for the preparation of the General State Budgets, will slightly correct upwards the economic growth data expected for this year, with more doubts about the changes for 2026. In September, the last update of this table, figures of 2.7% for 2025 and 2.2% for next year were expected. Many experts have already predicted larger increases, taking into account that, although it has slowed down compared to the previous quarter, the economy recorded a progress of 2.8% until September, waiting to know the trend in the last part of the year.
