The economic climate

The two features that characterized the year 2022 were the intense growth in activity, especially until the last third of the year, and high inflation, which was maintained throughout the entire year.

The best indicator for detailed monitoring of activity in real time is the one provided by the daily sales of the Immediate Supply of VAT Information system , published weekly on the AEAT website and whose evolution in 2021 and 2022 is shown, in various ways, in Charts 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3. In 2021, after hesitant beginnings and continued recovery in the central part of the year, there was a strong acceleration in the final stretch, caused in part by intense price increases. These high growth rates were those that were recorded in 2022 until approximately September, with the only exception of the temporary interruption at the end of March as a result of the transporters' strike. From that moment on, the trend was downward, both in nominal and real terms. All of this can be seen in the graphics. The first contains the level of daily sales. The approximation observed in the final part of the year corresponds to the deceleration seen in Graph 1.2 since September. Chart 1.3 shows the series in their monthly aggregation to be able to appreciate the impact of prices and the moderation of real activity in the last part of the year.

The same profile is reproduced in the quarterly evolution of the total sales of Large Companies and corporate SMEs , shown in Chart 1.4. This indicator is the one with the greatest coverage (more than 1.1 million companies) in the statistical landscape. As you can see, the intense growth of the first half of the year, a part of which was due to the poor results of the first quarter of 2021, still with the impact of the limitations on activity and the Filomena storm, was attenuated in the third and fourth quarters. These restrictions had most affected activities with a greater presence of small businesses; Therefore, as the situation normalized and growth moderated, the distance between large and small companies also closed.

The trend towards moderation was also reflected in GDP , the summary macroeconomic indicator most commonly used in conjunctural analysis. In 2022, growth in real terms was 5.5%, the same rate that had been estimated for 2021. According to this indicator, growth was concentrated in the second quarter, while in the rest of the periods quarter-on-quarter growth was close to zero. Unlike 2021, still partially conditioned by the effects of COVID and the subsequent recovery, in 2022 the recovery of foreign tourism brought the contribution of external demand closer to that of national demand (a year before, practically all the growth came from of the latter). In nominal terms, GDP growth in 2022 was 10% (7.9% in 2021), a sign of greater price pressure. The slowdown in the latter part of the year, on the other hand, was less pronounced than in real activity. Graph 1.5 illustrates this fact: The increase in the implicit deflator became greater as the year progressed. It should be noted in this sense that the deflator measures the prices of added value and, therefore, it can behave differently from the rest of the production or consumption prices. In fact, according to the evolution that can be deduced from these data, the price increases would have been, in principle, an inflation caused by intermediate consumption and only in the second half of the year would these price tensions have been transferred to remuneration and to the business surplus and, therefore, to the GDP deflator.

Regarding the evolution of employment , the trajectory was not very different from that experienced by the activity. Graph 1.6 shows three of the possible indicators available: the hours and people employed in the National Accounts and the number of Social Security affiliates. The last two were affected in 2020 and 2021 by the way in which the ERTE were counted, hence the need to also pay attention to the hours worked, a better approximation to the amount of work actually used. In 2022, this problem was not relevant and it is, therefore, indifferent to use one or the other indicator. In any case, all three point to a slowdown in the second part of the year, more accentuated in the number of hours due to the very atypical data of the first quarter. For the year as a whole, the number of hours grew by 4.1%, with 5.2% in the first half of the year and 3% in the second. In employed people, the increase in 2022 was 2.8% (2.5% in 2021) with growth of 3.7% in the first semester and 1.9% in the second. Somewhat higher figures were recorded in membership, although in the same sense: 3.9% in the year with an average of 4.7% in the first six months and 3.1% in the second part of the year. Graph 1.7, which includes the use of National Accounting, the affiliation and recipients of Large Companies and corporate SMEs (the fiscal employment indicator), all of them referring to the non-financial commercial economy, reinforces that same idea, that is, some initial quarters still with strong employment momentum and a subsequent slowdown, more intense in the final months of the year.

Charts 1.8, 1.9 and 1.10 clearly express the behavior of prices in 2022. The graphs include both industrial production prices (IPRI) and consumer prices (CPI). Prices had begun to rebound in the first months of 2021 and continued their rise throughout that year. Maximum growth was reached in the first half of 2022 to moderate the rest of the year, especially in the last stretch. Several aspects should be highlighted in this process. First, as was analyzed last year, inflation was much more severe in production than in consumption. The profile was the same (as seen in Graph 1.8), but the intensity was very different (note the scales). The second aspect to highlight is that, although the inflation derived from the energy component was fundamental (Graph 1.9), the explanation did not end there; The prices of the rest of the products and services also grew significantly (Graph 1.10). And, thirdly, precisely what is characteristic of 2022 is that, while in the second part of the year the price of energy began to moderate its growth, non-energy prices continued to grow, still at very high rates in production prices. and within an upward trend in the case of consumer prices (Graph 1.10).