The president of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, criticized this Wednesday the Government’s intention to create an observatory of business margins to monitor whether the profit that companies take as a percentage of their sales increases, an initiative that he has described as “interventionist policy ” and that seeks to interfere in companies, whose objective is “to make money”.
“If what we are talking about is more interventionism, then we will not share the issue,” said the leader of the employers’ association in statements to the media collected by Efe in an act on Sustainable Digitization.
The first vice president of the Government, Nadia Calviño, was the one who announced this Tuesday that an observatory of business margins will be created that will serve to take “effective” economic policy measures and better understand the distribution of income, drawing on data from the Bank of Spain, the Ministry of Finance and the National Institute of Statistics, among other organizations.
The objective of this body will be to control that companies do not increase their profit margins, that is, the percentage that their profits represent with respect to their sales, in order to prevent them from raising prices taking advantage of the inflationary environment above what they have risen. its costs. In this way, they would be able to increase their profit margins, they would become richer and they would contribute to creating more inflation, in what is known as second-round effects.
To date, according to data from the Ministry of Economy, only oil refining and energy distribution companies have increased their margins, mainly due to the increase in the price of oil in international markets as a result of the war in Ukraine and the fall of supply, while the rest of the companies in other sectors maintain similar margins or even somewhat below those they had before the pandemic.
Even so, the Ministry led by Nadia Calviño has already warned that not all sectors function the same and that there are even differences within the same sector, as occurs in the food distribution sector, where at some point in the food chain could be producing an increase in margins.
“It is very important to maintain effective competition in the markets for goods and services and an adequate distribution of income and for this we are going to reinforce monitoring by creating an observatory of business margins that will institutionalize and monitor the analysis work that is already being carried out the Bank of Spain and that it will take advantage of and use the data and statistics from both the Bank of Spain, the Ministry of Finance, the National Institute of Statistics (INE), among others, in order to achieve greater transparency and quality of information in an area that is essential at this time for adequate economic policy decision-making,” the Minister of Economy defended yesterday.
The increase in the cost of the shopping basket is, precisely, one of the Government’s greatest concerns, since it affects the entire population and is especially prevalent in lower-income families, in which food consumption represents a higher percentage than your total cost.
Garamendi has indicated that the Government has not informed them of the proposal, which they have learned about through the media, and that when they are told the details they will be able to comment on it. “If what we are entering into an interventionist policy with respect to the work of companies (…) explain it to me,” he added. “Companies have to make money,” he has defended.
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