Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has named Carlos Cuerpo, who currently heads the treasury department as his new economy minister.
According to AFP, the Prime Minister announced this on Friday.
Cuerpo, who studied at the London School of Economics, will replace Nadia Calvino, who is leaving to head the European Investment Bank, the bloc’s lending arm whose significance has grown since war broke out in Ukraine.
Sanchez praised Cuerpo as an “honest professional” with “deep knowledge of public administration and economic policy”.
“His predecessor sets the bar very high, but I am convinced that Carlos Cuerpo will brilliantly give continuity and depth to the exceptional work done by Nadia Calvino,” the Socialist premier added in a televised address.
Cuerpo, not a popular name in Spain worked intimately with Calvino, who previously worked in the European Commission’s budget department in Brussels before her political career began in 2018.
The new minister will make a concerted effort to get rid of a series of inflation relief policies in the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy, including cuts to the value-added tax on electricity and subsidies for transportation, as growth slows.
The Bank of Spain recently lowered the country’s economic growth outlook for 2024, citing slowing private consumption even as it expected inflation to ebb more than predicted earlier.
It estimates growth will have slowed down to 2.4 percent from a post-pandemic rebound 5.8 percent in 2022, and will expand by just 1.6 percent in 2024, below the bank’s previous forecast of 1.8 percent.
