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The increase in the scale of the is one of the main surprises that the Spanish economy has experienced in recent years, both due to the intensity of the phenomenon and its unintentional nature. These services encompass an amalgamation of professional activities, consulting, technology, research, logistics, finance and various administrative tasks. It is, therefore, a fairly heterogeneous set of branches, but what they have in common is that they are mainly aimed at companies. Unlike construction, agriculture, tourism and part of the industry, intended mainly for households, while public services have the mission of providing value to society in general.
has prioritized the crown jewel of European funds, and, more recently, construction. However, it is non-tourist services that have contributed the most to the good times the economy is experiencing. The wealth, or added value, generated by these services has increased by an overwhelming 21%, in total in the last five years, more than double that of the productive sectors as a whole (with data from the first three quarters of 2025 compared to the same period in 2019). These services explain more than half of the GDP growth recorded in this period.
Its expansion is revealing, starting after the outbreak of the real estate crisis and has accelerated after the pandemic. In 2007, construction represented 12% of GDP, and today it is half. The lost ground has been occupied (almost completely) by non-tourist services, whose contribution to the balance of payments is also notable: today the balance between exports and imports, ridiculous two decades ago, is around 2.5% of GDP, approaching the sacrosanct surplus of tourism.
for non-tourist services they have resisted all the crises that have occurred in recent times, in contrast to tourism, penalized by the pandemic, and industry, the most vulnerable sector to the rise in tariffs and the geopolitical tensions that cross the planet.
All of this strengthens the current expansionary cycle, and also entails lessons for economic policy. Firstly, the rise of non-tourist services has not been transferred to the productive model. That is, these sectors follow the same growth pattern as the Spanish economy as a whole, highly dependent on the incorporation of the workforce to support activity, while productivity is characterized by its weakness.
In the case of services, this growth pattern is more severe than sectors such as construction or tourism, which can continue to expand by resorting to immigration. Professional or technological activities, for their part, have to compete for talent that is in short supply globally and retain young people who are attracted to other destinations that offer better working conditions.
On the other hand, non-tourist services are relatively intensive in investment in “intangibles”, or intangible assets such as connectivity to the digital platform, technological capital and computer applications. The difficulty of recognizing this type of assets as collateral to obtain new financing constitutes a brake, which also affects the growth of companies and, therefore, productivity. These lessons should inspire the deployment of the remainder of horizontal measures that address barriers to investment and disinhibit the expansion of promising projects.
In short, the economy has diversified thanks to the consolidation of a powerful non-tourist services sector, providing robustness to the expansion cycle. But its transformation into a model capable of sustaining high levels of productivity and remuneration remains a pending task.
The balance of payments hardly suffers from the uncertainties surrounding the future of international trade. The current account balance showed a surplus of 37.9 billion euros until September, 8.5% less than the same period last year. The sharp deterioration in the imbalance in the exchange of goods – a consequence of the stagnation of the European market and, to a lesser extent, the increase in tariffs – has been offset by the surplus in the balance of services, both tourist and non-tourist. Similarly, foreign direct investment has fallen less than anticipated.
Raymond Torres He is director of Coyuntura de Funcas. In X: @RaymondTorres_
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