Companies are fleeing Catalonia at rates not seen since the regional independence movement last peaked in 2017.
In the first half of 2023, a net total of 49 companies officially declared that they had moved their fiscal residency out of Catalonia. To date in 2024, 495 companies have left the region compared to the 305 that have established themselves in the region.
The trends were reported in The Objective, which mined the data from Spain’s college of property registers. Escalating pro-independence rhetoric increases uncertainty, prompting the net figure for businesses leaving Catalonia to grow fourfold in 2024. Business sources for the website have blamed the striking number of departures on the increasing political instability of the region.
Pressure to relocate took shape in the aftermath of the political and social instability caused by the 2017 illegal referendum on the region’s secession from Spain and the subsequent, though failed, declaration of the region’s independence. Hundreds of companies moved their offices or operations out of Spain’s second city, once considered its most economically dynamic and most cosmopolitan.
In 2018, a net total of 1.799 businesses left the region in the wake of the illegal referendum and the weeks of accompanying protests and riots that left Barcelona in shambles. Since then, according to the news site, companies had been quietly quitting Barcelona and Catalonia—albeit at much slower rates—while outside investment has slowed. However, statistics now indicate that the central government’s latest concessions to Catalan independence have sparked a new wave of capital flight by the region’s businesses.
Since 2019, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has relied increasingly on Catalan independentists in the national parliament to keep his weak coalition governments together, requiring that he cede more and more to their demands. Through exemptions and an amnesty law, he has pardoned an increasing number of the politicians involved in the illegal 2017 referendum, paving the way for their reentry into the regional government. At the same time, the leaders of the independence movement have been clear about their intentions. They hope to conduct another referendum which succeeds this time.
The area is at an important moment, since no strong winner emerged from regional elections in May, making it difficult to form a regional government. At a time when it seems equally likely that Sánchez’s socialist party could govern effectively, the socialists could ultimately back a coalition led by independentists—or the region might have to go to a second round of elections.
Barcelona is Spain’s second city, an architectural gem on the Mediterranean that for decades eclipsed even the national capital Madrid in attracting visitors, workers, and businesses. The region it heads has long been one of most industrialized and economically strong in Spain. That has been changing in the last few years, ever since the regional independence movement began to push its cause to the limit.
