These are concentrated in certain professional, educational and commercial activities and they have generally found in favour of the complainant. In a decentralised country such as Spain, which needs different government units to cooperate with one another, these decisions must be taken into consideration by the so-called “sector committees”, which have the power to identify good practices and reach consensuses that can be embodied in legislation through, for example, harmonisation laws. Second, the Public Policy Assessment Law, approved at the end of last year, is intended to incorporate ex ante and ex post assessments into central government legislative processes. This will require the creation of a new appropriately funded State Assessment Agency. Third, with regard to access to public procurement, it is estimated that 12% of tenders in Spain in 2021 were not competitive (as against an EU average of 6%). The literature has highlighted various channels through which public tender awards may be conducive to business growth, investment, innovation and productivity when they are focused on small firms with high growth potential,20,21 since they may serve as collateral and thus improve firms’ access to bank finance.22 In this respect, one of the aims of the Law on Business Start-ups and Growth is to increase the participation of small and medium-sized firms in public tenders. 18  Bardhan (2020), Mora-Sanguinetti and Pérez-Valls (2020), Lucio and Mora-Sanguinetti (2021), Lucio and Mora-Sanguinetti (2022), Mora-Sanguinetti (2022) and Mora-Sanguinetti, Quintana, Soler and Spruk (2023).

Similarly, the number of those aged 19 in higher vocational training (as a percentage of the total of those either enrolled in these programmes or at university) increased from 20% to 25% over the same period. 12  On Eurostat data for 2020, 24% of students in tertiary education in Spain are enrolled in a field related to the natural sciences, mathematics, statistics, information and communication technologies, engineering, manufacturing and construction, compared with 28% in the euro area. In the Global Innovation Index (WIPO, 2022), Spain is ranked 61 out of 109 countries by number of science and engineering graduates. 4  school students, according to the OECD’s PISA database. Improving in this area calls for better trained, more professional teachers able to teach based on best practices. 3 Longer working lives, which will be unavoidable given current demographic trends, increase the need for sufficiently skilled, versatile workers able to switch jobs and lines of work over their working lives, especially in a context in which certain professional skills are rapidly becoming obsolete and the cognitive skills of the older population are increasingly deteriorating.13 Having workers take part in lifelong learning will require combating job instability, lowering the institutional barriers to business growth and helping to ensure that the training on offer at universities and vocational training centres caters to the changing demands of the job market. 4 Education spending in Spain is slightly below that seen in the euro area (on average, 4.2% and 4.7% of GDP, respectively, between 2010 and 2021).