national income

   According to the Statistical Office of the European Community, Spain's GDP in 1992 was 444,000m ecus and GDP per capita was 11,354 ecus (for the UK 805,600m ecus and 13,926 ecus respectively). Spain's net national income per capita was 10,014 ecus (UK 12,315). The average for the EC in the same year was 15,617 ecus for GDP per capita and 13,514 ecus for net national income per capita. On the basis of these figures we can say that the wealth of the average Spaniard is 75 percent of that of the mythical average European and 81 percent of that of the average UK citizen. At factor cost the proportion of national income accruing to employees is slightly lower than that for most other western countries and that accruing to entrepreneurial and corporate entities slightly higher. Regional disparities of income in Spain are substantial, with the richer regions (the Balearics, Madrid and Catalonia) having roughly twice the GDP per capita of the poorer regions (Galicia, Castilla-La Mancha, Andalusia and Extremadura), an inequality mitigated to some extent by the higher cost of living in the richer regions. There are also large disparities even within the same region between the more urbanized and the less urbanized provinces. The disposable income of households also reveals major differences between rich and poor households, but these differences have been narrowing slowly over the past twenty to thirty years, as the accompanying table shows. Although the top 10 percent of households still command a quarter of the country's wealth, there is much less disparity among the bulk of the population, with 52 percent of the country's disposable income going to the 60 percent of households in the middle and the differences in this large group being rather less marked.

   Further reading

   - Fundación FOESSA (1994) V Informe sociológico sobre la situación social de España, Madrid: Fundación FOESSA, vol. 2, 1, 413–549 (hugely informative but highly technical).

   - Longhurst, C.A. (1993) "Regionalism and Economic Disparities: Three Perspectives", ACIS: Journal of the Association for Contemporary Iberian