The State Secretary for Global Spain, Manuel Muñiz, has taken part today in the institutional inauguration of the first edition of Madrid Platform – a multisector meeting point for companies and institutions from Europe and Latin America - with the city of Madrid as the strategic link between the two continents.
He sent out this message in a speech that sought to convey “a message of optimism and of shared challenges”, stressing the need for “all public authorities to work together in this recovery process”.
In this regard, Manuel Muñiz highlighted the goal of the government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, and of Economic Diplomacy headed up by its State secretariat, to ensure that the recovery is “speedy, fair and equitable”, and gives rise to a “reformed Spanish economy that is more competitive, more digital and more international”.
Manuel Muñiz considers that having “several highly effective vaccines”, the approval of the Next Generation EU funds – of which “Spain is named as one of the main beneficiaries” - the Brexit agreement and the recovery plans announced by the new President of the United States, Joe Biden, are “all grounds for optimism”.
In contrast, Manuel Muñiz recalled that we continue to face some major challenges. The first is the pandemic which, in addition to the risk of new variants that force us to adjust the vaccination strategies, he pointed to the danger of “not reaching everywhere around the world in time”. In this regard, he recalled that “we have made a commitment to international solidarity” and that “the government is working at multiple forums”, and is one of the main donors to COVAX and to specific plans to increase production in third countries.
The State secretary also pointed, at an economic level, to the need to “restore mobility and enjoy a tourist season that is as close as possible to normal”; and to implement the Recovery Plan as “quickly, flexibly and effectively” as possible, aimed “at the worst affected sectors and at avant-garde sectors, such as digitalisation, decarbonisation and the circular economy”.
Manuel Muñiz particularly stressed the need to geographically distribute the recovery. “We cannot make the same mistakes as in 2008 and 2009, when a good part of the populations of advanced economies felt that they had been left behind”, since, “if we exacerbate the socio-economic breakdown, we also exacerbate the political breakdown and thus increase instability”. Accordingly, “the government’s response to the crisis has been from the bottom upwards” through Temporary Lay-Off Plans (Spanish acronym: ERTEs), maintaining jobs, and Official Credit Institute (Spanish acronym: ICO) loans and guarantees to SMEs, among others.
“Madrid is called on to playing a leading role in the recovery”
As regards Madrid, Manuel Muñiz stated that “it is called on, as a city and as a region, to be one of the leading players in the economic recovery process of our country, because it has digital and physical infrastructures, talent and human capital, an important academic, research and technology transfer ecosystem, a local and internationalised business fabric, and a great quality of life”.
Spain will undertake this recovery “side-by-side our partners in Latin America”, where our country has “a stock of 140 billion euros, where we create hundreds of thousands of jobs on the continent while Latin American companies located in our country do exactly the same”. Latin America, he concluded, “represents more than one third of Spain’s economic footprint abroad and these ties will be fundamental to the recovery”.