Aserious, but often overlooked repercussion of the Spanish Civil War is the delayed impact the 1936 to 1939 conflict is having today on the country’s public pension system.
Eugenío Recio, a welfare specialist at the Esade business school in Madrid, says the war caused a drastic fall in the birth rate and delayed the “baby boom” in Spain until a period of economic recovery from 1960 to 1975, more than a decade later than in most other western countries. This has contributed to what the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development calls a “demographic shock”, which is forecast to hit Spain later but harder than in other European Union countries also struggling to cope with the consequences of falling birth rates and longer life expectancy.
