It is extraordinarily surprising that people from the younger generations say so many absurd things about the Franco regime, and that some people from the older generations do as well. Is this due to a lack of knowledge? Or to ideologically biased misinformation? If it is due to a lack of knowledge, it should concern us greatly. If it is due to misinformation and ideology, it means that a part of the country, the one most deeply rooted in Francoism, has been busy praising it, while those who should have offered a different perspective have failed to do so. As an economic historian, I will offer a few insights into the economy under Franco, all drawn from the book I co-authored with Xavier Tafunell, Between Empire and Globalization: An Economic History of Contemporary Spain (There are versions in English and Spanish), which we have enriched and updated in various revisions from 2003 to 2021.
Several periods can be distinguished within the Franco regime. The first, and undoubtedly the worst, was the war (1936-1939). Franco himself provoked the war. The great economist and historian of the Republic, the war, and the Franco regime, Ángel Viñas, has amply demonstrated his involvement and leadership in preparing the coup. The losses in well-being caused by the war were substantial, made even more painful by the fact that Spain's economic situation, before the outbreak, was relatively good compared to the rest of Europe (67.3% GDP per capita). Spain missed out on the recovery that, after the Great Depression, swept across Europe and brought a period of prosperity between 1935 and 1939. By the end of the war in 1940, Spain had become much poorer. Its GDP per capita, compared to that of Western Europe, had plummeted to 50.3%, recovering from 43.1% in 1938! No lower proportions can be documented since 1787, in either times of peace or war.
Secondly, from 1940 to 1960, the Spanish economy endured twenty years of misery. These first twenty years—the longest of the Franco regime—should not be forgotten, as they were the product of his unquestioned will as an omnipotent dictator. The resulting misery was a consequence of his prejudices, incompetence, and refusal to correct his own mistakes. The absurd goal of autarky dominated everything. Except for the final years of World War II and the immediate chaos that followed (1944-1948), Spain reached its lowest point in GDP per capita relative to Western Europe in peacetime during the 1940s and 50s, both in comparison to its own past and to neighboring countries. In the 1950s, within the context of the Cold War, Spain began to grow again, driven by the United States and Europe, but always with enormous economic distortions and instability, the legacy of the autarkic nightmare, and without ever losing its relative impoverishment. Franco, a military man with no economic training, understood the economy as something to be disciplined. To control inflation, he prohibited price increases on many products (as well as wages, rents, and electricity). The result was a widespread black market that drove up prices across the board and allowed friends of the regime (and the dictator) to become rich through the black market, while enemies could be executed at the slightest attempt at illicit trade. Price controls and rationing were extended to almost everything. Gradually, throughout the 1950s, these controls were eased. The failure of the electricity restrictions had been so damaging to the dictator that what he most enjoyed doing afterward, in the 1960s, was inaugurating reservoirs. The two decades were thus marked by great misery: extreme in the 1940s and less extreme in the 1950s. In 1960, with the Stabilization Plan fully in effect, GDP per capita reached only 50.8% of the Western European average. One had to go back to the years 1936-1941 (the war and immediate postwar period) to find a lower proportion.
The growth of the 1960s and early 1970s, fueled by enormous internal and external migrations—painful and neglected by the authorities—and by the arrival of sun and beach tourism and capital investment, represented a recovery from the accumulated backwardness. The United States and Europe, always within the framework of the Cold War, helped reintegrate Spain into the global economic expansion—the Golden Age—following World War II, reversing Franco's disastrous economic policies. In 1972, Spain managed to recover and surpass (68.5%) the gap in GDP per capita with Western Europe that existed in 1935 (67.2%). Thirty-seven lost years!
Including the years 1973-1975, which coincided with the oil crisis, that makes forty lost years in terms of freedom, democracy, and also, let's not forget, economic growth and well-being.
