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Barcelona - 30 December 2018 2.00 h

The past year in numbers

While the main economic figures for 2018 show a marked recovery in the wake of the recession, they are more a cause for cautious optimism rather than euphoria

- Barcelona

Sta­tis­tics by them­selves never tell the whole story, but the fig­ures for the year tell us that un­em­ploy­ment is going down, in­fla­tion is under con­trol, ex­ports con­tinue to be a dri­ver of the econ­omy and that Cat­alo­nia is an at­trac­tive place for in­vestors and busi­nesses.

Though the reg­is­tra­tion of new ve­hi­cles stalled, the pop­u­la­tion con­tin­ues to grow, and stands at 7.5 mil­lion peo­ple, with mi­gra­tion bring­ing in an extra 47,549 res­i­dents, and the birth rate higher than that of deaths, al­beit by very lit­tle.

394,405 un­em­ployed

At the end of No­vem­ber, the job­less fig­ures stood at 394,405 peo­ple, 6.6% less than the pre­vi­ous year. The fig­ure is higher than the 369,124 job seek­ers reg­is­tered in July, dur­ing the hol­i­day sea­son.

1.9% in­fla­tion

The Con­sumer Price Index in No­vem­ber showed an­nual growth of 1.9%, five dec­i­mal points lower than Oc­to­ber, said Spain’s Na­tional In­sti­tute of Sta­tis­tics. Higher prices most af­fected hous­ing, al­co­hol and to­bacco, and food.

€645m in in­vest­ment

Gross for­eign in­vest­ment was 645.6 mil­lion euros in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2018, some 16% less than in the same pe­riod the year be­fore. Yet, this was less than the 21.7% drop ex­pe­ri­enced in Spain as a whole.

€36.6bn in ex­ports

In the first half of the year, ex­ports by Cata­lan firms reached the record fig­ure of 36.659 bil­lion euros. Ex­ports from Cat­alo­nia make up 25.3% of the total for Spain as a whole.

171,521 new ve­hi­cles

Reg­is­tra­tions of new ve­hi­cles fell be­tween Jan­u­ary and No­vem­ber by 1.7%, or 171,521 new ve­hi­cles sold in this pe­riod. The drop was most no­tice­able from Sep­tem­ber, when new rules on emis­sions were in­tro­duced.

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