German tour operators are taking a chance in 2024 by pushing to maintain the margin while in the south of Gran Canaria virtual holiday home operators continue to advance. The escalation of prices in the Gran Canaria hotel sector has been frozen, for the moment, just when environmentalist and anti-system groups on the islands want to stop the arrival of tourism because the holiday home market is expelling individuals from Las Palmas. Everything has been mixed and in the end the punished is the service sector industry in Maspalomas, Playa del Inglés and San Agustín.
Business activity in Germany's services sector stabilized in March, ending a five-month sequence of contractions in activity. The HCOB Final Services Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) rose to 50,1 in March from 48,3 in February, just above the 50,0 mark that separates growth from contraction.Overall, the The service sector is playing a stabilizing role in the broader economy but it is unlikely to be enough to prevent another quarter of GDP decline early this year.
Finance Minister Christian Lindner said in February that the growth projections were "shameful and dangerous from a social perspective" as Germans' discontent with their economic situation has sparked a series of strikes across the country. Nearly three in five companies see Germany's economic policies as a business risk, the survey showed, adding that 33% of companies plan to reduce investments in the country in the next 12 months, while 24% said who was planning an expansion.
Companies in the service sector are increasingly optimistic about the outlook, with business expectations reaching their highest level since February 2022, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There was also sustained job creation among service providers amid reports of strategic hiring, according to the PMI. It is clear that companies operate under the assumption that future workloads will justify current staff expansion
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Wage pressures continued to raise business costs, but inflation rates in both input prices and production costs slowed noticeably from the previous month. The composite PMI index, which comprises services and manufacturing, rose to a four-month high of 47,7 in March from 46,3 in February. The increase in the index was driven mainly by the stabilization of services activity and, to a lesser extent, by a slower decline in manufacturing production.
Last February, a DIHK survey of more than 27.000 companies showed that of those surveyed, 35% expect business to deteriorate until March 2025 and only 14% expect an improvement, as high energy prices energy, bureaucracy, a shortage of skilled workers and weak domestic demand are weighing on them. "The bad mood among companies is becoming more and more entrenched," said the DIHK in Berlin, adding that it would be only the second time in history of post-war Germany that the economy contracts for two consecutive years.
The first case occurred in 2002 and 2003, when two consecutive recessions pushed the then Social Democratic-Green government to introduce aggressive labor market and social welfare reforms that were credited with raising Germany to a level of internationally envied competitiveness.
