{"id":275963,"date":"2010-02-04T06:03:57","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T11:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/economics\/2010\/02\/04\/spain-were-not-greece\/"},"modified":"2010-02-04T06:03:57","modified_gmt":"2010-02-04T11:03:57","slug":"spain-we%e2%80%99re-not-greece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/275963","title":{"rendered":"Spain: We\u2019re Not Greece"},"content":{"rendered":"

In response to rising concerns about the state of Spain’s economy and its public finances, Finance Minister Elena Salgado said Thursday that Spain’s situation isn’t like that of Greece.<\/p>\n

“Spain’s situation is not like that of Greece, not in terms of public debt nor in terms of economic strength,” Ms. Salgado said in an interview with La Cope radio.<\/p>\n

Greece has been forced into a draconian debt- and budget-deficit reduction program by the European Commission after the country admitted last year its deficit was much higher than previously thought. Greece’s troubles have raised concerns about other countries, like Spain, with high deficits and low economic growth prospects.<\/p>\n

Joaquin Almunia, European economic affairs commissioner, said at a meeting with journalists Wednesday that Greece, Spain and other countries share some of the same problems. “In those countries, we’ve seen a continuous decline in competitiveness since they joined the euro,” Mr. Almunia said.<\/p>\n

Spain is grappling with the collapse of a decadelong housing boom that has pitched the wider economy into a deep recession, sending tax revenue plummeting and social welfare costs soaring. Last week, the government said its 2009 budget deficit likely stood at 11.4% of GDP, far in excess of the 3%-of-GDP limit for EU countries.<\/p>\n

But Spain also has a relatively low level of debt over gross domestic product and, up until the crisis struck, a good track record of fiscal management. “In the case of Greece, there has been a problem with its statistics,” Ms. Salgado said. “There is no similar problem with any other E.U. countries, certainly not with Spain,” she said.<\/p>\n

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In response to rising concerns about the state of Spain’s economy and its public finances, Finance Minister Elena Salgado said Thursday that Spain’s situation isn’t like that of Greece. “Spain’s situation is not like that of Greece, not in terms of public debt nor in terms of economic strength,” Ms. Salgado said in an interview […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":850,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/850"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}