other extreme, maintaining workers ’ full purchasing power would pose a threat to firms ’ capacity to generate sufficient funds to conduct their investments and, ultimately, would jeopardise their survival, to the detriment of employment and welfare. the information available to date suggests that such cost sharing across firms and workers is already taking place on a tacit basis. specifically, in the collective bargaining agreements registered to march the wage increases for 2022 stood at 2. 4 %, well below the recent increase in consumer prices and that expected for 2022 as a whole. therefore, in practice workers are losing purchasing power. that said, in large part, this increase essentially reflects the deals struck by the social partners in the multi - year collective bargaining agreements negotiated over the past two years in an inflationary setting that bears little resemblance to the current one. there are therefore signs that this stabilisation mechanism is running out of road. with this in mind, i believe that concrete action is needed. similarly, in the case of businesses, recent data reveals that they have not fully passed on their rising costs to their customers, and their margins are therefore likely to have been squeezed. this can be inferred, for instance, from the feedback from spanish firms in the latest edition of the ebae for the first quarter of 2022. according to the survey, around 82 % of businesses saw their costs rise as a result of higher input prices, whereas just over 40 % raised their selling prices. second, the asymmetric impact of the current shocks on workers, firms and sectors must be borne in mind when determining the specific features of the incomes agreement. the necessary coordination at national level must therefore be combined with mechanisms to ensure the agreement is able to cater to the existing productivity and activity - related differences across firms and sectors. 8 equally, where the standard of living of certain segments of households is hit particularly hard by rising energy costs, the incomes agreement should naturally seek to mitigate their straitened circumstances. in short, these considerations reveal the need to avoid overly sweeping measures to implement a potential incomes agreement that might prove too rigid for certain groups of agents. third, any approaches that automatically link wages to past inflation or indexation clauses are also to be avoided9. the aim is precisely to reduce the risk of triggering a wage - price feedback loop. in this regard, workers with collective bargaining agreements registered up to march this year that provide for any form of wage guarantee clause linking the final wage increases agreed in

on russia, but clearly this is not something that can be achieved in the short term. the surge in inflationary pressures apparent in the march data partly reflects the increase in commodity prices associated with the war, but also the delayed effects of the acceleration in intermediate costs in the preceding months on the prices of other goods and services, and the scarcity of certain products as a result of the road hauliers ’ strike. the impact of the increase in energy costs is highly uneven across groups of agents. in the case of households, those with low incomes are most affected. in the case of productive sectors, the impact is naturally greater on the more energy - intensive ones. a second channel, that is also very significant, is the impact of the war on household and business confidence, given the extraordinary uncertainty surrounding the duration and course of the war. this, in turn, introduces uncertainty over the behaviour of the incomes of these agents, which means they tend to postpone their consumption and investment decisions. the sharp decline in the consumer confidence indicator in march ( the largest decrease in the historic time series, which goes back to july 1986 ) gives an indication of the magnitude of these effects. this fall suggests that the increase in uncertainty may have begun to adversely affect household spending decisions. the results of the latest edition of the banco de espana business activity survey ( ebae ) suggest that the war has begun to worsen the expectations of non - financial corporations regarding their turnover and also the duration of the global supply chain problems, which is now estimated to be longer. third, the invasion of ukraine will affect the spanish economy through the trade channel, the direct impact of which is assumed to be moderate, as bilateral trade flows with the countries at war are relatively limited. in 2019, the last year before the pandemic, spanish goods exports to russia and ukraine represented only 1. 6 % and 0. 3 % of the total, respectively. russian tourism, meanwhile, accounted for 2. 2 % of total spending by foreign tourists. however, the indirect effects on spanish trade flows may be significant. the war will particularly affect central and eastern european countries, which are more exposed to ukraine and russia, and, therefore, the growth of spanish export markets. further, the invasion is having a negative impact on the global supply chains for certain productive processes, with signs of a worsening of bottlenecks, after the partial improvement in the fourth quarter of 2021, although the lockdowns in china to check the