Is Spain a rich country? Dear Steemiters...

It is true that young people are emigrating nowadays, although most are university graduates, or so the media tell us. Actually, it is very difficult to get data on this phenomenon. This is because there are several kinds of Spaniards leaving the country nowadays: the young graduates mentioned above; immigrants from the last decades who managed to naturalise and are now going back home; the children of these, already born in Spain. Statistics do not normally discriminate; if they do, they distinguish on place of birth, which is not helpful.

So we do not really know how many people are emigrating. A safe guess would be in the tens of thousands per year.

Then, is Spain rich? Well, this is debatable. Let's look at gross domestic product per capita, at pruchasing power parity. These are data commonly understood to be useful to assess if a country is rich. Wikipedia has data from three entities:

According to the International monetary fund, Spain has 33,711 $ per capita. This means the 32nd position, between New Zealand and Malta.
According to the World Bank, Spain has 33,094 $ per capita. This means the 30th position, between Ecuatorial Guinea (a former colony!) and South Korea.
According to the C.I.A., Spain has 33,000 $ per capita. This means the 36th position, between Israel and Ecuatorial Guinea (again!).
So, well, Spain is not rich among the rich, Qatar-style; not a top-notch country, G-7 style, either; but is not exactly a poor, fucked-up country where nothing works. You can live pretty decently in Spain. Actually, we have received millions of immigrants between 1995 and 2007; obviously, they were not coming to fall into poverty.

That said, Spanish economy shows a lot of weaknesses. Just to name a few, there is structural unemployment, hardly ever being below 10 %; economy has been dependent on the construction and tourism sectors to grow (and both are rather unstable sectors); worker's productivity was one of the lowest in Europe before 2008 (now it is not so bad, apparently); Spain was not widely industralised before the 1960s. This is why the crisis hit so hard, and why so many immigrants are going back home.

Oh, and about Ecuatorial Guinea: there are extraordinary oil reserves there. The country used to be one of the richest in Africa, but it seems that during the long presidency of Teodoro Obiang Nguema, there are large sectors of population left in poverty.