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The Spanish miracle (Spanish: Desarrollo económico de España) was the name given to the Spanish economic boom between 1959 and 1973. The boom was bolstered by economic reforms promoted by the so-called technocrats, accepted by Francisco Franco, who put in place development policies from the International Monetary Fund. The technocrats were a new breed of politicians who replaced the old falangist guard.

The implementation of these policies took the form of development plans (Spanish: Planes de desarrollo) and it was largely a success: Spain enjoyed the second highest growth rate in the world, just after Japan, and became the ninth largest economy in the world, just after Canada. Spain joined the industrialized world, leaving behind the poverty and endemic underdevelopment it had experienced since the loss of the Spanish Empire at the beginning of the 19th century.

The recovery was heavily based on public investment on infrastructures and the opening of Spain as a tourist destination. The Miracle ended the period of autarchy (closed economy) and could be considered to be the response to the economic crisis of Spain after the Spanish Civil War and the challenges of World War II. The economic growth saw noticeable improvements in Spanish living standards and the development of a middle class in Spain, though Spain remained less economically advanced relative to the rest of Western Europe (with the exception of Portugal and Ireland). At the heyday of the Miracle, 1974, Spanish income per capita was 79% of the western European average, only to be reached again 25 years later, in 1999; while the economic indicator par excellence, the electricity production went from 3.61 in 1940 to 90.82 millions of Megawatts-hour.

The economic boom led to an increase in (often unplanned) building on the periphery of the main Spanish cities to accommodate the new class of industrial workers brought by rural exodus much similar to the French banlieue.

The icon of the Desarrollo was the SEAT 600 car, produced by the Spanish SEAT under FIAT licence. More than 794,000 of them were made between 1957 and 1973, and if at the begining of this period it was the first car for many Spanish working class families, at its end it was indeed the first second one for many more.

The automotive industry was really one of the most powerful locomotives of the Spanish Miracle: from 1958 to 1972 it grew at a yearly compound rate of 21.7%; in 1946 there were 72,000 private cars in Spain, in 1966 there were 1 million. These astonishing figures had no equal in the world.

Notes

1. J.L. García Ruiz, "Barreiros Diesel y el desarrolo de la automoción en España" ftp://ftp.funep.es/phe/hdt2003.pdf.

See also

• German Wirtschaftswunder (German economic miracle)
• Instituto Nacional de Industria
• Pegaso
• Seat

• Francoist Spain