tariffs<\/a> on the EU, it is still working to diversify trade and investment relationships, Carlos Cuerpo said during a visit to Canada.<\/p>\nCountries including Italy, Poland and Spain have yet to use EU recovery funds that include grants and loans and must be implemented by August 2026, subject \u2060to EU regulations.<\/p>\n
Spain was one \u200cof the main recipients and had been due to receive around 160 billion euros ($187 billion) – roughly half in grants and half in loans.<\/p>\n
“Financially, there \u200dis no advantage for us to go for those loans, because we can do it ourselves with our own issuance of debt,” Cuerpo said.<\/p>\n
Spain’s economy has by far outgrown its European peers in the past two \u200byears, diminishing its public debt burden as a share of GDP.<\/p>\n
He said Spain had \u200cfocused on the direct EU transfers to boost sectors including green energy, and might ultimately spend just around 25% of the loans.<\/p>\n
“We will be closing these negotiations with the (European)Commission in the next few days, but it will be around that figure, yes, maybe a bit higher,” Cuerpo said.<\/p>\n
Since the exposure of Spanish exports to the U.S. market is lower than that \u2060of other EU partners, Cuerpo said, “there is no significant \u200bimpact” at the macroeconomic level from the U.S. tariffs, \u200bbut did not rule out that a “potential impact might come from an indirect channel, from France, from Germany”.<\/p>\n
The EU signed a deal with Trump involving \u200da baseline tariff of \u206015% on most EU goods. The International Monetary Fund has said Spain is less affected than other large EU economies.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Cuerpo said he thought bilateral trade with Canada \u2060could be doubled and voiced confidence a trade agreement between the Mercosur bloc of South American countries and \u200cthe EU would be signed before the end of the year.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Caroline \u200cStauffer; editing by Andrei Khalip and Mark Heinrich)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Caroline Stauffer TORONTO, Dec 3 (Reuters) – Spain will use only about a quarter of European Union…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[18958,32,2000,80637,299,5187,1699,49851,104],"class_list":{"0":"post-610403","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-carlos-cuerpo","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-eu-members","12":"tag-europe","13":"tag-european","14":"tag-european-union","15":"tag-loans","16":"tag-spain"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115658023016837470","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}