Real per capita income in Spain rose by 5.16% last year, the second highest increase of the 19 OECD countries for which data are available, behind only Hungary, and for the first time surpassed the level of early 2007, before the financial crisis broke out.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which on Tuesday published quarterly data on real per capita income (an indicator in which taxes and contributions are deducted and social benefits are added), indicates that between October and December the increase in Spain was 3.70%.
Once again, this increase was the second largest among the countries for which statistics are available, behind Hungary, where the increase was 5.01%.
For the OECD as a whole, the increase was 0.51% in the fourth quarter and 1.21% in 2023 as a whole.
Spain had to wait until the last three months of 2023 to surpass for the first time the base 100 that the OECD takes as a reference at the beginning of its historical series, in the first quarter of 2007, when it reached 101.15 points.
In other words, it has taken Spaniards almost 17 years to recover the level of income in real terms that they had at the beginning of 2007, when the financial crisis began to take shape with the collapse of the real estate bubble in the United States due to the mortgages known as 'subprime' and which had its symbolic hatching in the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers bank in September 2008.
In the OECD's historical series, which provides complete data for 19 of its 38 member countries, there are only two that have not recovered in all that time and are still far from the 100 level of early 2007: Greece, with only 82.34 in the fourth quarter of 2023, and Italy with 91.7.
At the other extreme, real income per capita has risen to 62.72% in Poland and 61.55% in Hungary, which has reached 161.55 points.
Among the organization's major countries, growth over the past 17 years has been 27% in the United States, 13.5% in Germany, 10% in France and 9% in the United Kingdom.
In the OECD as a whole, real per capita income at the end of 2023 was 22% higher than at the beginning of 2007, which illustrates the relative relegation that Spain has suffered throughout that time within the developed world.
By 2022, real income per person had fallen by 3.46% in the OECD (the drop was as much as 16.01% in Chile and 5.83% in the United States) and 2.88% in Spain.
In the last quarter of last year, there were increases in 11 of the 19 countries for which data are available, while they fell in six and remained stable in two.
Among the large economies, they rose in France (0.7%), the United Kingdom (0.5%) and the United States (0.4%), while they declined in Canada (0.7%) and Italy (0.4%).
Looking at 2023 as a whole, there were increases in the United States (2.9%), the United Kingdom (1.3%) and France (0.5%), while decreases were noted in Canada (1%), Germany (0.9%) and Italy (0.4%).
