IEB Report

Tax Systems Analysis

Fiscal Sustainability in the Post-COVID-19 Era

IEB Report 4/2021: Fiscal Sustainability in the Post-COVID-19 Era

The shock of COVID-19 and the subsequent response has underscored the importance of the public sector’s role as a backstop. There is no doubt about that. The alternative to public-sector intervention would have been an unprecedented economic collapse. Indeed, unprecedented is more than a rhetorical expression: even with public intervention, Spain’s real GDP fell by nearly 11%. In other words, the initial economic growth forecasts for 2020 ended up being off by nearly 13 percentage points. This will have consequences, obviously, for the level of public debt and, potentially, for the sustainability of our public finances. In this respect, Spain’s situation is not very different from that of other developed countries.