A new Catalan policy report puts numbers behind a difficult proposition: could a region protect living standards if economic growth stopped being the organizing goal? Its answer depends on far-reaching shifts in energy use, transport, food, taxation, housing and work.
The full report, published this week by ICTA-UAB, was written by Salvador Pueyo as part of the European Research Council-funded REAL project. It is a policy proposal for Catalonia, not a forecast of what will happen or evidence from a real-world transition already under way.
Its central argument is that public policy should be judged first by whether people’s needs are met within ecological limits, not by whether gross domestic product keeps increasing. GDP measures the market value of goods and services produced in an economy. It remains useful for tracking output, but it says little by itself about distribution, unpaid work, resource use or the durability of living standards.
The premise takes the debate beyond calls to add wellbeing measures alongside GDP. The OECD’s work beyond GDP also argues for a broader scorecard. Pueyo’s report asks a more demanding question: how would jobs, public revenue and basic services be organized if growth ceased to provide the system’s usual cushion?
Energy use sets the scale of the proposal
The report’s energy calculations show why its proposals reach well beyond electricity generation. It estimates that supplying Catalonia’s current energy uses entirely with renewables, including international aviation and shipping, would require installations covering land equal to about 4.9% of the region’s territory, excluding rooftops and similar built surfaces.
The authors argue that efficiency and lower demand would reduce that land requirement. Their preferred order is to use rooftops, degraded land and other lower-impact sites before expanding onto more contested ground. The report says a large share of current electricity consumption could be met by photovoltaic panels on rooftops and degraded land, but solar output varies by hour and season, so grids, storage, wind generation and demand management still matter.
That is a more constrained proposition than simply replacing every fossil-fuel use with clean electricity. It also puts road traffic and aviation at the center of the policy package. The report proposes less private car use, more public transport and electric-vehicle support directed toward leasing, car sharing and community fleets.
It also recommends a substantial reduction in air traffic, paired with taxes intended to capture some of the scarcity value created by lower supply. The authors argue that this could reduce resource use and raise public funds. Any effect on tourism or housing would depend on the precise tax design, travelers’ choices and property-market responses.
Food and trade would be harder to separate
The report is equally direct about food. Catalonia’s livestock industry uses imported crops and produces meat for export as well as domestic consumption. Its calculations put Catalan residents’ pork consumption at about 20% of the output leaving slaughterhouses and about 38% of pigs raised in the region.
Ending meat exports alone would not create a self-sufficient food system under the report’s assumptions. It estimates that sustainable livestock farming which avoids competing with human food production would provide less than 10% of current livestock-product consumption. The proposed response is a large move toward plant-based diets and agroecological farming, which combines ecological methods with food production.
Under current diets, the report estimates that sustainable local food self-provisioning would remain below 30%. With far lower consumption of animal-derived food, it puts the theoretical maximum at about 80%, assuming no food loss or waste. Catalonia would still trade with other places. The point is to reduce exposure to imported feed, fuel and food rather than to turn the region into an isolated economy.
Redistribution would carry more of the load
Growth has historically made it easier for governments to collect revenue and for employers to add jobs. A system less dependent on expansion would need other ways to protect household incomes and fund public services.
Pueyo’s report proposes shorter working hours, a job guarantee for people facing persistent difficulty finding work, and a larger place for public and cooperative employment. Its minimum job-guarantee version is estimated to cost 2.4% of the Generalitat’s non-financial expenditure, with an assumed participation rate of roughly 45% among people experiencing sustained employment deprivation. Those are model inputs, not confirmed budget commitments.
It also outlines “adaptive ecovouchers,” known by the Catalan initials EVA. The proposal combines an environmental consumption tax with a complementary currency distributed to residents. People with relatively high measured environmental impacts would pay more through the system, while those below a chosen threshold could receive more than they pay.
Land taxation is another pillar. The authors argue that a progressive tax on land value could be harder to avoid through capital flight than taxes on mobile financial assets, while helping fund public rental homes, housing cooperatives and social spending. The report says the tax rates and administrative details need further work.
Catalonia cannot make every decision alone
Catalonia operates within Spain and the eurozone. It does not set monetary policy or impose capital controls, and many of the report’s objectives would require national or international coordination. The researchers nevertheless identify measures they believe the Generalitat could pursue on its own.
That institutional limit is one of the report’s strongest cautions. Its figures are semi-quantitative estimates and its proposals carry political trade-offs that cannot be settled by a model. Cutting flights, changing diets, taxing land and remaking employment protections would redistribute costs as well as benefits.
The report’s contribution is to make those choices more concrete. It sets out what a post-growth program would ask of energy users, farmers, travelers, employers and taxpayers, then leaves the larger political question open: whether a region can build durable public consent for such a shift before the constraints it identifies become still tighter.
