The Government rules out that the increase in commercial margins was due to the strong rise behind prices last year, which was practically 8.5% of the media, although inflation reached a peak of 10.8% in the month of July. Sources from the Ministry of Economic Affairs explain that the inflationary pressures responded, above all, to the increase in the cost of energy and imported goods. However, they have emphasized the need for these margins to “remain stable” in a context as volatile and loaded with uncertainty as the current one.
The same sources explain that without the distortion of the refining sector, companies have been recovering in the aggregate the levels of margins they had before the pandemic, given that with the health crisis these fell “brutally”. It is an idea that the Bank of Spain (BdE) also recently pointed out, which added how, by not having been able to transfer all the increase in production costs to prices, companies have lost some real rent.
In what has to do specifically with the food sector, from the Ministry led by Nadia Calviño they influence the message that the first vice president herself has been launching these days. The Government does not appreciate that the distribution margins, which are narrow, have reached as a whole. “The important thing is that competition works” due to the structure of the market itself and the decisions of consumers, they have settled. They also confirm with the preliminary data available to them that the VAT reduction is being transferred to food prices.
The “best guarantee” is that competition is effective in the distribution market, they have pointed out. It is a message that clashes with the one launched by the ‘purple’ wing of the coalition government. The Minister of Social Rights and leader of Podemos, Ione Belarra, this week accused large distributors such as Mercadona or Carrefour of “filling their pockets” with food prices.
Better prospects for 2023
In a meeting with the media at the ministry’s headquarters after learning that GDP increased by 5.5% last year, sources from Economic Affairs have highlighted that the prospects for the start of this year are better in terms of quarterly growth. arbitrator The economy comes from stagnating in the third and fourth quarters with growth of just 0.2%. Consumption and exports are two of the positive surprises due to their greater contribution to growth, which has even exceeded the expectations that the Government had before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
This inertia allows the data to be more positive for the current year and leads the Executive to maintain the moment of its growth calculation at 2.1% for the whole of the year. “We think that the factors that could explain lower growth for 2023 have lost strength,” they maintain, citing energy prices, rationing risks, a higher-than-expected rise in interest rates… Approximately 1. 2 points of the progress that the activity disturbed in 2022 (of that 5.5%) are due to the Recovery Plan.
With regard to wages, they are confident that they will grow above the 3% that they did, as a whole, last year and they see no signs of pressure from unit labor costs on inflation. “We do not see that there is pressure for the moment,” they point out. Of course, in the Ministry they emphasize that it is very important that the social agents and collective bargaining address the cost of the impact of the war.
