José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s Socialist prime minister, has found a new slogan – menos ladrillo y más ordenadores (“less bricks and mortar, more computers”) – to describe the policies he hopes will pull the world’s ninth largest economy out of its deepest recession since the death of the dictator Franco in 1975.
After 14 years of uninterrupted growth, Spain now faces a daunting double challenge: first, its own spectacular domestic housing bubble has collapsed, swelling the ranks of the unemployed and exposing the economy’s excessive dependence on homebuilding; and second, its open economy has been hit by the global crisis.
