Immigration and industrial policy in the Spanish economy: insights from the 2025 BdE-CEMFI-UIMP conference

Spain is being reshaped by two forces that are usually discussed separately.A renewed immigration boom is altering population growth, labor supply, housing demand, and household consumption.At the same time, geopolitical tensions, the green and digital transitions, and the reorganization of global value chains have returned industrial policy to the center of economic debate.These developments create major opportunities: immigration can mitigate demographic decline, reduce supply bottlenecks, and expand demand, while trade reallocation and public investment can support new activities.But they also expose constraints in housing, integration, strategic dependencies, and state capacity.Earlier contributions in SERIEs quantified the aggregate effects of Spain's first immigration boom (Izquierdo et al. 2010), while more recent work shows how housing shapes the way Spanish cities absorb large inflows (González-Pampillón and Jofre-Monseny 2026).The four articles in this issue extend that agenda and connect it to the renewed debate on industrial transformation.This special issue of SERIEs brings together four contributions presented at the 2025 Banco de España-CEMFI-UIMP Conference on the Spanish Economy, "Immigration and Industrial Policy: Challenges and Opportunities for Spain," held in Santander on 3-4 July 2025.Following the conference program, the first two papers study the scale, composition, and assimilation of immigration, and the other two examine Spain's position in changing supply chains and the institutional foundations of industrial policy.The first two articles focus on different aspects of immigration.In the first contribution, Joan Monras broadens the study of the economic consequences of immigration beyond the labor market, which is the traditional focus of the economic literature on immigration.The paper documents that housing is the main dimension along which immigrant and native consumption patterns differ, shows that