Spain emptied of shops

• ATA data. Catalonia loses almost 1,600 freelancers in the year while the Community of Madrid earns more than 5,000
• Editorial.Financial gap in Spain emptied

Orense, Palencia, Burgos and Huesca . Four provinces that are part of the so-called emptied Spain, and four provinces that suffer one of the numerous and important consequences of this situation: they are the ones that have lost the most autonomous trade in the last four years.

This is evidenced by the data published yesterday by the Association of Autonomous Workers (ATA) and which, therefore, confirms the high number of store closures that have been registered in these territories. In the first three, the number of self-employed workers in the sector has decreased by more than 10% between November 2015 and the same month of 2019, while in Huesca the figure is -9.6%. This means, for example, that today Orense has 741 fewer stores, Palencia and the said province of Aragon have suffered a reduction of more than 300 stores, or that Burgos has gone from 6,380 to 5,729 self-employed.

Very close to these provinces, is Guipúzcoa, which with a loss of just over 9% represents a striking exception in that relationship between the emptied Spain and the fall in the number of shops. But in the rest of the data the clear parallelism between these two circumstances is confirmed. Thus, Asturias, Cantabria, Soria, Teruel and some areas of Castilla-La Mancha are also among the places that more autonomous workers have lost.

« Trade is the sector that has most accused the depopulation process . When the small business is closed in a town, the town dies, and when there are no real opportunities for entrepreneurship and generational change in those same towns, young people leave and businesses lose all possibility of customers. Where a trade closes, the life of the people is lost. Where there is a loss of population, such as Asturias, Galicia or Castilla y León, the autonomous ones suffer the most, ”explains Lorenzo Amor, president of ATA.

These data, in addition, are framed in a situation of widespread loss of self-employed in the sector in the whole country. "Trade faces great challenges such as online sales and digitalization that will force traders to renew themselves and those pre-crisis figures will not be recovered," they continue from ATA, which offers the following figure to show the magnitude of the process: « In Spain, 23 freelancers of commerce are lost in the last four years ».

In fact, between 2015 and 2019 only Malaga and Santa Cruz de Tenerife have been able to increase their number of shops, while in the rest of the provinces the figures are negative. Madrid, despite the strong growth it has experienced in the analyzed period, has suffered a reduction of just over 1%. And the reduction in the whole of the Basque Country is also striking, as already allowed to guess the data of Guipúzcoa, or in Catalonia.

In the specific case of the Catalan community, much of the decline is due to the negative evolution of the province of Barcelona : almost 6% of self-employed less represents a loss of more than 5,600 workers, the highest figure in absolute terms of all the country.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• Palencia
• Huesca
• Burgos
• Autonomous

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