Ara in English - progress

The necessary regional policy

Francesc Xavier Grau — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 05:52:09 +0000

With a GDP exceeding €280 billion and more than eight million inhabitants, Catalonia would be positioned at the center of the European Union. Its human and economic dimensions invite better use of the capacities distributed throughout the country, which presents internal realities with a size and potential comparable to those of many European regions that promote their own innovation and smart specialization strategies (RIS3). It is necessary to bring out the endogenous and differentiated capacities of each Catalan region so that, with the involvement of their economic fabric and the support of at least one university, they can become knowledge regions responsible for their own development policies.

"We have sectors that create jobs with poverty wages or where there are no people to work."

Leandre Ibar Penaba — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 14:49:23 +0000

"Perhaps we're not doing entirely well," says economist Modesto Guinjoan (Riudoms, Baix Camp, 1954), regarding the state of the Catalan economy. On paper, the Spanish government, the Generalitat, unions, and employers' associations are happy: Spain is one of the leading countries in economic growth, and job creation in Europe and Catalonia has been growing faster than the national average for two years. The problem, according to Guinjoan, is not specific growth but rather the progress of the economy and, above all, of Catalan society.

The words of the 21st century

Joan Majó — Thu, 15 May 2025 16:01:10 +0000

In recent months, several individuals have played an important role in global geopolitics, having been very present in events we have experienced or even witnessed. For a few years now, Putin; for a few months now, Trump and the billionaire Musk; for a few days now, Pope Francis; and, this week, the new Pope Leo XIV. I speak of people because current information distribution systems mean that news reaches us more through them than through stories. I take this opportunity to emphasize once again that we are experiencing a radical change in our history, and I want to emphasize that these changes will mean revising the meaning of a significant number of words.

The Declines of the West

Ferran Sáez Mateu — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 19:10:48 +0000

Now barely a century ago the unclassifiable German thinker Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was revising the first volume of The decline of the West published in 1918, and was in the midst of writing the second, which appeared in 1923. This long and dense essay, now almost forgotten, was probably the most influential of the first half of the 20th century. By 1921 Europe had left behind the unprecedented ravages of World War I, as well as the deadly influenza of 1918. People needed an answer, or at least a clue, to help them digest the immense disaster, and the word decadence is very inviting. It is exactly the same today, even though the inviting concepts have changed. A hundred years ago, Spengler presented the history of the great civilisations in the context of a kind of life cycle that went from the emergence to death, passing through an inevitable cycle of decadence. With that bombastic and always a bit muddled style of the Nietzscheans, Spengler considered that the key to the decadence of the West lay in the decline of the Faustian spirit, that is, of the transgression of limits, of going beyond natural impositions. Wanting is part of this Faustian spirit, but, as the myth of Icarus explains so well, it can have fatal consequences. In fact, one of the first uses of airplanes at the beginning of the twentieth century was bombing.