BigBallinStalin wrote:betiko wrote:i have to say i'd be very curious to see what happens if they become independent... a great science lab to see "what would happen if". there are so many provinces in europe fighting for independence, and it has always seemed so dumb. "look what happened to scotland" will be quite interesting; right now I doubt it will be as horrible as some might say or as great as some others think, it's worth testing. Is there turning back?
Catalonia splitting from Spain has great potential to be a prosperous move. To name one potential: they get to drop Spain's disastrous labor regulations which prevents unemployment from falling. The problem is that the Spanish government (IIRC) threatened Catalonia with an economic embargo if it kept thinking about leaving, so there's that cost. In one sense, it's dumb that a central government would want to prohibit regulatory innovation across its provinces, but in another sense it's smart for the central government to reject secession because secession would result in lower central government revenues for Spain's dumb public policies.
UBS, JP morgan and all you want mark catalonia's independence as a high risk factor.
Independentist economists claim that the new state, if created, would manage to keep incomes and expenses at the same level; but this is just theorical. This doesn't take into acount possible political decisions such as creating an army or not; and increasing the police force and any other decision to help the state be more "sovereign".
CataluƱa has a huge public debt towards the spanish state, and it would be interesting to figure out how they would pay it as the conditions would definitely change. This is all economic-fiction; it's hard to predict what would happen with spain, with the EU and with other neighbours. How would the spanish workforce working in spain would react and so forth. It's really not as manichean as that.