Home » News » Barcelona and business headquarters, by Manel Pérez

Barcelona and business headquarters, by Manel Pérez

The closure of the Barcelona factory in Nissan in Barcelona, as unavoidable as it is regrettable, has once again brought to the fore the debate on the importance of hosting business headquarters, understood as decision centers, for the future and power of an economy. In the case of the Japanese automaker, its strategy for the future has been designed with the group’s interests in mind Renault, its benchmark shareholder, in preserving its position in the European market and ensuring the maximum permanence of its activity in French territory.

A decision that, in addition, has reinforced the Government of the French President, Emmanuel Macron, conditioning the important financial aid granted to the company to the preservation of jobs and investments. Economic nationalism, a criterion as regrettable as it is common in practically all the governments of the world. Nobody grants aid to companies that are going to reduce their activity in the country. In times of expansion, public contributions help expand activity. In times of economic downturn, such as the one that has unleashed the coronavirus globally, they are trying to avoid cuts or frights like Nissan’s now.


Business decision centers have a key economic role in cities; but they go further

This last case, however, threatens to be the first in a series in the automotive sector, which is facing an adjustment process that can be described, without exaggeration, as historical. Nissan will not be the last crisis in the near future. And there will also be more cases in other areas of activity. One of the consequences of the pandemic is another major transformation of the economy, with changes not only in individual and private behavior.

Companies will make up for lost productivity due to sanitary limitations and new regulations, with more automation and changes in production processes. Economic history teaches that this translates into profound transformations that erase activities, factories and companies from the map at the speed of light. From here to the discovery of the vaccine remains an eternity in the calendars of the new economic change.

Public officials who have to deal with closure files of multinationals or large companies know that the worst thing is having to force dialogue with an owner or shareholder away from the center or factory affected. Companies make their most drastic decisions much more easily if the consequences are distant.

The headquarters is always valued as the most productive place, since it houses managers, essential activities and advanced services, concentrates the most qualified jobs and from which the demand for external business services of the highest level is generated. Activities associated with companies’ social and public responsibility are also programmed around their most direct geographical area of ​​influence, from promoting culture to collaborating with public administrations.

Barcelona has lived in the recent past, not even three years ago, a singular episode, without parallel, of stampede of social headquarters, as a result of a serious political crisis. Several thousand companies, some very large, most medium-sized and also some small, approved their change of headquarters in a very short time. In the heat of the political debate, some announced the end of the immediate world, total paralysis, without companies or work. In the opposite direction, others denied it the slightest significance, and even some local socialist colorist came to reduce the impact of these transfers on the Catalan economy to the cost of hiring a “secretary” (sic) and an office for rent. At that time, it was not possible to engage in an objective debate on the meaning and possible consequences of that singular political decision that a large part of Barcelona’s business community adopted collectively.

STEPHANIE LECOCQ / EFE

From then to the present moment, in the particular race between the Catalan capital and that of the State, the latter has gained even more economic weight, it is already the first in the State after displacing Catalonia, and although it would be simplistic to attribute that overtaking Only when Catalan companies arrived, even exaggerating their importance, it does not seem very reasonable to deny their possible contribution to the phenomenon. To the perennial centralist drive of the State, the concentrating pressure of globalization and the desire to ingratiate themselves with power, to be close to those who approve economic norms, was added the new impulse of a bourgeoisie in search of what it considered a more safe.

The past has no remedy and it is no longer possible to change it, just interpret it. The transcendental thing now is that Barcelona asks itself if it needs to recover these headquarters, if in the new economy that is prefigured it needs companies of suitable dimensions to feed activities with added value. And, above all, if the Catalan capital thinks that it can face the future without closing the open wound with its economic elite. Outside an effective or symbolic transfer, according to the perspective, the environmental split is undeniable.

Barcelona will need a new boost, economically and administratively. And for this you must accumulate internal energies of all kinds. Especially those derived from having a dense network of economic decision centers. And these will not come from the hand of multinationals less and less willing to lavish themselves on representation expenses.

Partly to avoid the mistakes of the previous recovery, that of the 2008 crisis, when the city and its area of ​​influence were handed over to tourist debauchery and property gains, while applying the internal devaluation model to habitual residents. Error also shared by all, also the business class. Partly because the new economic challenges cannot face the sectors with the most capacity to finance and undertake the large projects that from now on will be necessary and with a State flooded with debt.

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