A few months ago this newsletter echoed the publication of the Observatory of Business Margins , a project of the State Tax Administration Agency in collaboration with the Ministry of Economy, Commerce and Business, and with the Bank of Spain. Since then, apart from the updating and expansion of the Observatory, various statistics have been published that allow us to complete the panorama of the evolution of business results after the 2020 crisis.

The publication of the Observatory of Business Margins in August brought as a novelty the dissemination of the first company accounting data for the 2022 financial year. It must be remembered that companies whose fiscal year coincides with the calendar year have until July 25 to submit their Corporate Tax return, which includes, among the information necessary to complete it, the profit and loss account from which the gross operating result is deducted. Given that the universe of companies for Corporate Tax is not closed until well into the following year (due to the existence of different fiscal years), the information provided by the Observatory at this point about the year 2022 is offered in terms of constant population ( the set of companies that declared both in 2021 and 2022). Historically, the difference between the results of this constant population and those finally observed has been small (as the following graph illustrates), so that, even without having all the tax information, the approximation is good enough.

With the information available for 2022, it is confirmed that in practically all sectors the gross operating result in 2022 exceeded that obtained in 2019, even in those activities that were still in difficulties in 2021. The following graph summarizes these results.

This is what concerns companies, but what happened in these years in personal and professional companies? The Income from economic activities statistic was recently published, which exploits the information contained in the personal income tax return relating to the activity of self-employed workers and professionals. The publication provides detailed knowledge of these companies (territorial distribution, gender and other personal characteristics, importance of business income with respect to the rest of their income,...), but also gives the possibility of analyzing the evolution of the companies over time. most important variables. The main conclusion of the 2021 edition, which is the one that has now been published, is that, although the number of filers did not fully recover after 2020, the returns clearly did. If these results are analyzed together with those of the Observatory, one can also verify (see the graph below) the coherence shown by the results in one source and another (in economic activities the year 2022 is estimated with the provisional data of file of bases, rates and accrued taxes that accompanies the Monthly Tax Collection Report ).

Finally, two weeks ago the Statistics of corporate and non-corporate SMEs was published, which jointly analyzes two groups of companies: non-corporate SMEs that declare in normal and simplified direct estimation in the Personal Income Tax , and small corporate companies that do so in the Corporate Tax. It is, as can be seen, a subset of the companies included in the two sources seen above. The idea of this statistic is to analyze a group that is as homogeneous as possible (in activities, in availability of information,...), so that the differences between them can be detected. The results confirm the patterns that were already seen in previous editions, while, once again, evidencing the improvement in benefits experienced since 2020.