Natural disasters are often described as acts of God. After the devastating Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755— an event that killed tens of thousands and nearly erased the city from the map—Europe’s leading philosophers debated its meaning. Voltaire blamed nature. Rousseau famously replied: “Nature did not construct twenty thousand houses of six to seven stories [near a seismic fault]”.

The local financing system in Spain makes little distinction between municipalities based on population size. Yet the financial problems facing small municipalities in rural areas differ greatly from those of large cities or municipalities located in metropolitan areas. This IEB Report thus aims to propose the most appropriate financing system for rural municipalities, large cities, and metropolitan areas.

Well-designed federal government structures manage to reconcile the centralized provision of pure public goods (Federalist Papers, No. 30) with improvements in allocative efficiency through the decentralized provision of other public goods (Oates, 1972). In Spain, the best recent example of the provision of pure public goods – including collaboration with a supranational level of government, i.e. the EU – was the management of COVID-19 (e.g. the provision of vaccines or granting of financial aid to the hardest-hit economic sectors). As for the latter case, Espasa et al. (2017) found that decentralization of welfare state policies led to improvements in public satisfaction.

Although early economic theory and empirical research highlighted the potential disemployment effects of binding minimum wages (MWs), a growing body of evidence— strengthened by improved methodologies and richer data— has deepened our understanding of minimum wage (MW) policies, partially reshaping this perspective (Dube and Lindner, 2024).

Access to housing has become a major problem, ranking high on the lists of Spaniards’ top concerns in the latest surveys by the Spanish Center for Sociological Research (CIS) and Catalan Center for Opinion Studies (CEO). There are objective grounds for this concern. According to OECD data, in Spain, housing-related expenditure as a share of total household expenditure increased by 8 percentage points between 1995 and 2022.

The labor market participation of women has been converging to that of men across many high-income economies during recent decades. For instance, in the euro area (and according to Labour Force data from Eurostat), the percent of females employed in the population aged 20 to 64 went from 54.9% in 2000 to 67.2% in 2019, an increase of 12.3 percentage points. Over the same period, the same statistic for men remained quite stable, showing an increase of only 2 percentage points. The OECD data on gender wage gaps also reveals a decrease in the wage gap (expressed as percentage of median earnings of men) in OECD countries, from 18.1% in 2000 to 12.6% in 2019. However, women continue to be underrepresented in high-income, high-status occupations, and overrepresented in part-time and insecure working arrangements.