EconLabGalicia is born

New year, new project. In this case, knowledge transfer. I have been insisting for a long time in the pages of this newspaper on the importance of strengthening the connection between the university and its environment. Without a doubt, many people are already doing things well; the rectorates of the three Galician universities are giving it greater prominence in their strategies and actions; the administrations are increasingly aware of the importance of having the best when thinking about the problems and opportunities of the country, and let me highlight here the valuable role of the Royal Galician Academy of Science in the last decade, especially in the last five years, in valuing the talent that it treasures in the Galician university system.

We are convinced that Galicia can be a pole of innovation in public policies at the regional level. In the midst of the pandemic, someone said that we would come out better. I am convinced that in Galicia it was so. It made us understand much better the advantages of cooperation and joint work, above professional profiles or ideological perspectives; that government and society go further when they think about problems together.

The new project is another grain of sand. The central axis will be public policies with economic content and relevance; specifically everything that has to do with public spending and income and the regional financing system, in which we have already been working for years. The idea is to do it in a more orderly and protocolized way. We can and must be more ambitious. We can, because we have the capacity; and we must, because with the strong decentralization that exists in Spain, Galicians and the Xunta have the capacity to alter the scenario. And it is not to be expected that it will be from Madrid that they do the work in our area of competence.

That is why I start 2025 with the excitement of launching this new project, with the same excitement with which Emilio Pérez Nieto and I launched the Galician Economic Forum in 2010. The underlying philosophy and many of the people who will participate in EconLabGalicia are the same; success will have to be worked on.

Santiago Lago Peñas - Op-Ed in Prensa Ibérica Media: Faro de Vigo - Opinión Coruña - El Correo Gallego