We have calculated what Spain loses every year because its companies declare a purpose they don’t actually exercise. If that money reached the payroll, every private-sector employee would earn around €2,870 more a year. That is the purpose gap, measured in salaries.
By Ángel Bonet, founder and president of ImpactCo
This week we presented El Coste Invisible, the report in which we at ImpactCo tried to price something almost nobody measures. Call it the distance between the purpose companies write on their website and the one they apply when they decide. The figure is €44.5 billion a year: the cost of the purpose gap. That is 2.6% of GDP Spain doesn’t produce because its companies work with the handbrake on.
The headlines focused, understandably, on the fiscal impact: activating that potential would contribute some €19.6 billion a year to the public purse without raising a single tax, without more deficit and without more debt. Yet there is another way of reading the figure that strikes me as far more revealing, because it puts faces to the number. I did the sum with my team one afternoon, almost out of curiosity, and I haven’t been able to shake it since.
The purpose gap, translated into payslips
Spain has roughly 15.5 million private-sector employees, according to the latest Labour Force Survey. These are the people working in the companies that would generate that value. Share the €44.5 billion among them, and each would receive around €2,870 more a year.
Spain’s median salary is €24,497 gross a year, according to the National Statistics Institute. It leaves half of workers above and half below. Those €2,870 represent a rise of 11.7%. For someone on the country’s most common salary, €16,520, the increase would exceed 17%: the equivalent of almost two and a half extra monthly payments.
+11.7% on the median salary if the €44.5 billion we lose to the purpose gap reached private-sector payrolls. That is more than double Spain’s current inflation rate of 4.9%.
Put that in context. Inflation has now stayed above 4% for three consecutive months, and families are feeling it at the supermarket, on the gas bill and in the mortgage payment. A double-digit pay improvement is not negotiated in any collective agreement in this country. And yet that money exists. Nobody has to take it from anywhere or from anyone. The purpose gap simply stops it being generated.
I am aware this is a theoretical exercise. The value a purpose-driven company releases never transfers whole to the payroll. It splits between investment, profits, taxes and wages. Still, the exercise measures the scale of what we are losing, and the scale is enormous.
What that money would do in the real economy
An extra euro in the pocket of someone earning €16,000 a year doesn’t sit still. It gets spent in the neighbourhood, in the shop next door, at the postponed dentist appointment, on a child’s English classes. Middle and lower incomes have a far higher propensity to consume than high ones, so every euro arriving there multiplies activity, employment and tax revenue.
That is exactly what a middle class does. It sustains domestic demand, stabilises cycles and finances everyone’s public services through its spending and its taxes. No healthy economy has ever prospered without one. And that middle class is precisely the one narrowing in Spain, caught between salaries that don’t take off and prices that do.
Henry Ford understood this in 1914, when he doubled his workers’ pay to five dollars a day. His peers called him mad. His factory was bleeding staff almost as fast as it hired them. After the rise, the workforce stabilised, productivity soared and his own employees could buy the car they built. Ford wasn’t doing philanthropy. He was making one of the best investments in industrial history.
The extractive company destroys its own wealth
Now look at the other side of the purpose gap. Our report finds that 70% of Spanish companies say they have a purpose, yet 39% confuse it with mission and vision. In other words, they have it framed in the boardroom and forgotten in the accounts. That is the purpose gap in one sentence. The clearest symptom shows up in people: employee engagement in Spain stands at 10%, where Gallup measured 18% in 2012. Nine out of ten workers come in to comply, not to build.
That disconnection carries an invoice. Absenteeism alone, once replacements and lost production are added, reaches an estimated €128.7 billion. Replacing an executive or a highly specialised profile can cost up to four times their annual salary. Every time a company squeezes wages, cuts training or burns teams out to balance a quarter, it borrows from its own future. The interest rate is very high.
The problem doesn’t stay inside the company either. Spain closed 2025 growing at 2.8%, one of the best figures in Europe. Yet in that same year a third of our children and adolescents, around 2.6 million, were living at risk of poverty or social exclusion. We grow, but we don’t prosper together.
Inequality is a productivity trap. Highly unequal economies grow more slowly.
I say this without wanting to polarise, because I believe deeply in business and in profit. However, the extreme concentration of wealth carries a paradox that economic history repeats again and again: it ends up devouring itself. A company that squeezes its employees runs out of talent. A sector that impoverishes its workers runs out of customers. An economy that leaves its middle class behind runs out of demand, cohesion and legitimacy. Once legitimacy goes, wealth that looked solid evaporates at a speed that surprises its own owners.
Closing the purpose gap is the best growth strategy
I have spent twenty-five years in business, and I have never seen a lever for creating value as powerful, as cheap and as wasted as genuinely caring for people. Paying with dignity, training, trusting, giving work meaning. When that happens, absenteeism falls, talent stays, innovation appears and the customer notices. No business model stands up to the comparison, which is why corporate purpose has become a survival strategy.
That is why I insist so much on the purpose gap: the difference between declaring a purpose and implementing it. Implementing it means taking purpose to management indicators, to investment decisions, to supplier relationships and, yes, to pay policy. It means the board asks about workforce engagement with the same seriousness it asks about EBITDA, because one explains the other.
The €44.5 billion are there, waiting. We can keep leaving them on the table, or we can decide that the Spanish company of the future will make more money precisely because it looks after its people better. That decision depends on no government. It depends on those of us who chair, run and invest in companies.
How much value is your company leaving on the table? If you chair a company, a fund or a family business and want to turn purpose into measurable results, write to us at tribu@impactco.es.
A note on the calculation. This is an illustrative exercise based on El Coste Invisible (ImpactCo, 2026): an opportunity cost of €44.5 billion a year divided by private-sector employees estimated from the Labour Force Survey, Q3 2026 (INE). Median salary (€24,497) and most common salary (€16,520): Annual Survey of Salary Structure 2024, INE. Inflation: flash estimate for October 2026, INE. Engagement: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, Spain.