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International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
The Spanish economy has continued to outperform euro area peers, as a pickup in domestic demand has offset subdued exports. Notwithstanding the impact from the war in the Middle East, growth is projected to remain robust in the near term before slowing further as labor force gains, which have fueled growth in recent years, taper. Risks are predominantly to downside.
International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
2026 Selected Issues
Mariarosaria Comunale
High-frequency signals for Andorra were combined into a timely real-time estimate of quarterly GDP growth using a mixed-frequency nowcasting model. The resulting framework delivers a transparent, nowcast of quarterly GDP growth together with uncertainty bands. It can also be used for near-term scenario analysis.
Nick Carroll
and
Aidyn Bibolov
Andorra has a solid health system, delivering strong outcomes with lower public spending than the average in EU countries. However, health spending increased significantly between 2014 and 2025 and will remain a key source of pressure over the medium and long-term as the population continues to age. This paper reviews recent trends in government health spending in Andorra and identifies reforms that strengthen health financing and more tightly manage high-cost areas that could help reduce pressure on government expenditures, preventing the crowding out of other spending and/or the need for higher contributions.
International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
Andorra’s small open economy continues to grow above potential driven by external demand and a prospering financial services industry. Inflation is edging upwards after a period of moderation amidst a labor market operating near full employment. Cautious fiscal management continues to drive overall budget surpluses and reinforce fiscal buffers. Banks are profitable with ample capital, however, the size of their consolidated assets – at more than 5 times GDP – presents a systemic risk. The war in the Middle East will weigh on growth and put upward pressure on inflation in the near term while challenges including low productivity, lack of affordable housing, capacity limitations, and impact of climate change on winter tourism will put downward pressure on growth over the medium term and aging will strain public finances. The European Union Association Agreement (EUAA) offers the opportunity to deepen the integration into the EU’s single market and diversify Andorra’s sources of growth, but there will be transition costs and the exact timeframe for ratification remains uncertain. Reforms to the public pension and healthcare systems are needed to make them sustainable.
Julien Acalin
Sovereign state-contingent bonds have rarely been issued despite their theoretical debt stabilization properties. This paper revisits this puzzle by analyzing when growth-indexed bonds are too limited in scale, and when they are too costly, to materially improve debt sustainability. The results show that the benefits of indexation are highly heterogeneous across countries. Under the realistic assumption that 20 percent of the debt stock is indexed, reductions in the upper tail of the debt distribution are modest. Full indexation yields more substantial improvements, especially when combined with an optimal loading on growth. Yet a sustained premium of 100 basis points would still offset most of the gains for many countries. These findings suggest that the debt-stabilization properties of growth-indexed bonds would be limited, unless a large-scale and coordinated effort achieves both broad adoption and low issuance premia.
Ha Nguyen
,
Ashwini Arulrajhan
,
Carlo Pizzinelli
, and
Ippei Shibata
This paper studies how house prices shape internal migration across Spain’s provinces and the implications for the spatial allocation of labor. Using a gravity-style framework, we estimate the causal impact of destination and origin house prices on bilateral migration flows between 2007-2023. To address the potential endogeneity of house prices, we instrument provincial house prices with a Bartik-style predictor of external inflows of foreign migrants, allowing this housing demand shock to have larger price effects in provinces with tighter land constraints. The instrumental variable (IV) estimates show that housing costs constitute a significant barrier to internal migrants—a 10 percent increase in destination house prices reduces inflows by about 4.0 percent, while a 10 percent increase in origin house prices increases outflows by about 2.8 percent. These push effects of origin house prices are larger for foreign-born and foreign-born young individuals compared to natives. Rental costs have even stronger effects than home sale prices. A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if house prices in high-productivity provinces had not grown faster than the inflation over 2017-23, about 63,000 more working-age individuals would have migrated to these provinces, as opposed to just 1,700 (in net terms) in practice. While the direct implied GDP gain would have been small—about 0.05 percent over this period, such gains would accumulate over time if regional divergence in house prices were left unaddressed. Furthermore, this estimate does not factor in the much larger gains from attracting a large number of recent foreign immigrants—not studied here—to the most-productive regions.
International Monetary Fund. Middle East and Central Asia Dept.
Real GDP growth accelerated to 4.8 percent in 2025Q1:Q3, supported by a rebound in agricultural output and a surge in large-scale infrastructure projects. Inflation remained low, allowing Bank Al-Maghrib to maintain a neutral policy stance after earlier rate cuts. The current account widened moderately as imports rose with investment, partly offset by buoyant tourism. Revenue overperformance has been used for additional spending on investment and transfers and a slightly faster than expected reduction in the overall fiscal deficit to 3.5 percent of GDP. Structural reforms are advancing in key areas, and implementation of health, education, and employment strategies is being accelerated. Morocco’s hosting of large international events (including the 2030 FIFA World Cup) and the upgrade to investment grade by S&P reflect strong investor confidence and open new opportunities for growth.
Andre O Santos
The objective of this paper is to assess the impact of single-name and widespread markdowns in syndicated leveraged loans on systemic risk in the euro area. Systemic risk implications of markdowns are simulated with network valuation models (as in Bardoscia et al. (2016)) and extended to accommodate recapitalization of systemically important banks. Key results indicate that, while the impact of single-name and widespread markdowns in syndicated leveraged loans on banks’ equity is not significant under a strong confidence in the banking system, their impact could be devastating if confidence is low. This could be mitigated by timely and calibrated recapitalization of systemically important banks.