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ANDALUSIA BETS ON SOCIAL ECONOMY AND THE CREATION OF THE ANDALUSIAN COUNCIL OF SOCIAL ECONOMY

Junta de Andalucía

Spain is a highly decentralised State divided into 17 Autonomous Communities. Andalusia is one of these autonomous communities being the Junta de Andalucía the regional autonomous government of Andalusia. The Autonomous Communities hold the exclusive competence on social policy.

Recently, after the regional elections that took place on March 25th  , the Government of the Junta de Andalucía has been reshuffled. Due to this reorganisation, it has been created the Regional Ministry for Health and Social Welfare, which will assume the development of policies for social services in Andalusia assigned to the Department for Equality and Social Services until now.

Among its policies, the Government of Andalusia has opted for increasing the production system in Andalusia on the basis of the social economy; to this end, the new regional Government wants to double the weight of the social economy sector till to reach the 16% of the economic activity and employment in Andalusia by 2020.

In order to achieve the aforementioned objective, the Junta de Andalucía proposes to develop the Third Pact for Social Economy, to create the Andalusian Council of Social Economy, to disseminate the principles and values that make up the cooperativism and to favour integration as well as strategic collaboration among cooperatives to gain a greater size and competitiveness .

Social economy enterprises will play an important role in the sustainable economic model that the Andalusian Government intends to develop, since they have proven the capacity to generate wealth and employment in good times and a greater resilience in times of recession without abandoning their social values.

Thus, the cooperative is the engine that renews the production model towards traditional sectors and into emerging sectors and contributes to wealth creation and stable employment, especially with the more vulnerable groups.

There are  7,500 social economy enterprises in Andalusia, employing 74,000 workers, leading the national ranking in this sector, both in number of companies (21% of total), for number of workers occupied (20.3% of total).