Likewise, the Employment Law and the changes in unemployment benefits seek to ensure compatibility between protecting the most vulnerable and providing appropriate incentives for job seekers. Looking ahead, public employment services need to play a more prominent role in job mediation (currently very minor) and their training and vocational integration activities need to be more effective. This requires appropriate professional profiling of the unemployed, rigorous assessment of training and vocational integration programmes and, on the basis of this assessment, sufficient funding for these programmes. Squaring protection for the more vulnerable groups with appropriate incentives on the labour supply-side calls for greater coordination between active and passive policies. The capacity of migration policies to effectively smooth any mismatches arising in the Spanish labour market also needs to be continuously monitored. The fifth factor I wish to refer to is confidence in institutions and their management capacity. Both these types of confidence are currently low in comparison with other European countries.24 The efficiency of public administration may have a key role to play in overturning this perception. For example, efficiency indices for the Spanish judicial system stand below those in comparable countries. In this respect, one of the priorities of the Spanish Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (RTRP) is public administration modernisation. Specifically, the aim is to improve the efficiency of public administration through, among other measures, a digitalisation drive, strengthening the public policy assessment framework and reducing the proportion of public employment that is temporary.

The sectoral structure of the Spanish economy, skewed more towards services such as wholesale and retail trade and the hospitality sector, only partially explains our country’s poor level of productivity, as measured in terms of output per hour worked. This output stands 14% below that of the euro area. If Spain had the sectoral structure of the euro area, this negative gap would still be 10%.2 1  Endogenous growth models show that knowledge is the only factor of production that generates positive externalities and economies of scale. Romer (1986), Lucas (1988) and Aghion and Howitt (1992). 2  This figure is a 2020 update on the figures set out in Cuadrado, Moral-Benito and Solera (2020). 2  Nor can lower productivity be attributed simply to the smaller size of Spain's business sector. When the registry data on firms from Spain, Germany, France and Italy are grouped together by size, Spanish firms are between 10% and 20% less productive than their European peers, regardless of size.3 In reality, this lacklustre productivity is symptomatic of an array of interconnected shortcomings. Today I will focus on five factors behind these shortcomings. The first factor concerns the very minor role played by innovation in our economy. To give one example: between 2020 and 2021 the ratio of research and development and innovation (R&D&I) expenditure to GDP stood on average at 1.2% in Spain, 0.8 pp below the euro area average.4 The private sector’s failings in this area are particularly striking.