The European Commission believes that Escriva’s immigration forecasts, on which pension reform calculations are based, are partly too optimistic. According to new forecasts from the EU executive, with which Aging Report which will be released in the spring, the influx of immigrants will decline sharply throughout this decade and in 2050, when the entire generation baby boomSpain will accept about 196,000 immigrants, compared with the 450,000 expected by Social Security.

Immigrants are a very important part of pension cost projections because Spanish pensioners are planning to shoot themselves In Spain, over the next few decades, the number of adults of working age will decrease – hence the difficulties of reforming the pension system. It’s his fault baby boom Spanish, which gave rise to the largest generation in history, born between 1957 and 1977, and the fact that today each Spanish woman has an average of only 1.1 children, while life expectancy continues to rise.

It was all these difficulties that forced the participants in the reform negotiations to ask themselves many questions. Should the state pension only cover part of the pension? Is it inevitable that these benefits will be cut, given that they now cover many more years than they did a few decades ago, while the money the employee put into the pot remains the same? Finally, the minister’s team Jose Luis Escriva decided not only to keep pensions in their previous form, but also to establish by law their increase, based on the annual increase in prices, and to finance this increase in expenses through social contributions and other already approved measures.

According to the ministry’s calculations, pension costs will increase by about three points until 2050, when accounts will have to withstand intense pressure from baby boom– but this increase will be offset by extraordinary revenues that will be generated by increased social contributions, on the one hand, and by measures to discourage early retirement and encourage delayed retirement. As this newspaper has explained many times, these are estimates that institutions that study government accounts have already described as optimistic, with the understanding that the reform will have to be adjusted in a few years to bring government accounts back into balance.

In particular, in the report published and presented Information– The European Commission expects current net migration to fall to 220,000 immigrants per year in 2030, falling to 196,000 in 2050 and 185,000 in 2060. On the other hand, Escrivá’s calculations, which can be found in the report Projections for government spending on pensions in Spainrecently published and sent to the European Commission show the department expects net immigration to decline to 200,000 by around 2030, which will then rise to more than 450,000 in 2050. That is, by 2050, Brussels expects Spain to receive almost half as many migrants as it does in government.

Unemployment, GDP, life expectancy

But the main differences lie not only in the arrival of migrants, but also in unemployment rates, GDP and life expectancy. The Ministry predicts the unemployment rate in 2050 will be 5.5%, while the Commission expects it to be 6.4%. The differences are also important over the rest of the horizon: the Social Security scenario assumes an 11.4% rate over the 2023-2030 period; 8.7% in 2031-2040; 6% between 2041 and 2050; 5.5% between 2051 and 2060 and 5.5% between 2061 and 2070. On the other hand, the Commission expects the unemployment rate for people aged 25 to 74 to be 12.5% ​​in 2022 and 10.5% in 2030. , 8.8% in 2040, 6.4% in 2050 and 6.2% in 2050 and 2060.

Regarding the macroeconomic scenario, the current government estimates interannual nominal GDP growth at 4.9% for the period 2023-2030; 4.1% from 2031 to 2040; 3.5% between 2041 and 2050; 3.5% between 2051 and 2060 and 3.6% between 2061 and 2070. The Commission’s forecasts are much more modest. expecting GDP to grow by just 0.8% in 2030; 1.6% around 2040; 1.3% in 2050 and 2060 and 0.8% in 2070.

Finally, and this time in the opposite direction, what is striking is that the government predicts that life expectancy will increase much more than Brussels believes. According to Social Security estimates, life expectancy of women will reach 91.4 years in 2050, and for men in the same year will reach 87.1 years, reaching one of the highest rates in the European Union, the Commission believes that Spanish men will then live long. and 89.7 for women, and that they won’t reach the numbers projected by Social Security until about 2070.