It is obvious that it´s still too early to assess properly the impact of this labour market reform, and any such evaluation will have to consider multiple issues, including employment, labour turnover, human capital accumulation, among others. In the meantime, learning from the experience in other countries about the impact of similar regulatory changes on temporary employment could prove to be useful for the design of a rigorous evaluation of this reform in the case of Spain. These issues are covered in the first session. Second, another major challenge for the Spanish economy is the dismal performance of aggregate productivity, the ultimate and most important engine of economic growth and prosperity. Average annual total factor productivity growth over the 2000-2019 period was 0.2% in Spain, as against 0.5% in the euro area (and 0.9% in the United States). Among the various determinants of this gap, recent literature has been highlighting the role of the misallocation of resources across firms and the small size of businesses, which has a bearing on the country’s low aggregate productivity. In particular, 35.7% of total employment is in firms with less than 10 employees, compared with 28.5% in the European Union. To tackle this challenge, it is essential to explore the various reasons why our business sector is so skewed towards small, low-productivity firms and to mitigate the effects.
Let me finally express my gratitude to the organisers for making this conference possible and to all of you for attending. I wish you a very productive meeting and a pleasant stay in Madrid. Thank you very much. 6