The cancellation of the Mobile World Congress, an event that was to bring together almost 3,000 companies in Barcelona and generates an economic impact close to 500 million euros and 15,000 jobs, is a bad news . The coordinated efforts of all administrations have failed to retain this year's edition in the Catalan capital. The progressive trickle of companies announcing their withdrawal claiming fear of contagion of the coronavirus was narrowing the hopes that an event of this nature could be held, in which the Chinese delegation has a decisive representation. The enormous damage inflicted on the Barcelona economy, and therefore for the Spanish economy , is already a fact.

Bad luck has meant that the first major world congress that coincides with the expansionary phase of the new virus was Mobile. However, strictly speaking, it has not been canceled for sanitary reasons - neither Barcelona nor Catalonia nor Spain as a whole are areas with appreciable risk of contagion - but rather economic. The global economy is based on trust, and fear destroys it without paying attention to scientific reasons : once the snowball of apprehension starts, the cascade of reactions happens unstoppably. It has been of little help that the Minister of Health insisted on denying any public health problem, even if the reason helped him. The Mobile is a private event, and it is their organizers who assess the risks and decide. Other congresses can now suffer from the domino effect, and it will be so revealing that they suffer from it as the opposite. In that sense, we wonder why the Amsterdam fair remains.

It is true that the latest editions of Mobile have not been exempt from speculation that questioned the suitability of Barcelona to host it. The deterioration of the image of Barcelona in these years , the result of both the populist management of Ada Colau -turismophobia, increase in crime- and the outbreak of the separatist process -the escape of thousands of companies, the barricades burning after the sentence-, they did not contribute to good insurance to reassure the organizers, who demand political and social stability to do business in a favorable environment. That is why Isabel Díaz Ayuso, before any global epidemic was declared, offered Madrid as an alternative in the event that Barcelona ceased to represent the preferred option for the sector. In any case, if we have weighed other reasons for those alleged for cancellation we will know next year , when the concern for the coronavirus has disappeared. The organizers' contract with the Fira de Barcelona is valid until 2023. If the only reason for this suspension has been the fear of an epidemic, there is no reason to believe that in 2021 the Mobile will not return to Barcelona.

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  • Barcelona
  • Salvador Illa
  • Mobile World Congress
  • Madrid
  • Isabel Díaz Ayuso
  • Spain
  • Catalonia
  • Ada Colau
  • Editorial

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