Spaniards have become richer than Italians — a heartening indication of Spain’s economic revival but a worrying sign for Italy, the eurozone’s third-largest economy, which is stuck in political gridlock.

Spain’s per capita gross domestic product exceeded that of Italy in 2017, according to IMF data published this week that compare countries on a so-called “purchasing power parity” basis. The IMF also forecast that Spain would become 7 per cent richer than Italy over the next five years. A decade ago Italy was 10 per cent richer on the same basis.

The data and forecasts show the sharply diverging fortunes of two countries that were severely hit by the eurozone economic crisis over the past decade. While Spain is now one of the fastest growing countries among leading EU economies, Italy remains an economic laggard.

By 2023 some former Soviet bloc countries, including Slovakia and the Czech Republic, are also expected to become richer than Italy on a per capita basis, the IMF forecasts show.

“It’s been since the 16th century that Italy and Spain keep overtaking each other — but they have something on us now,” said Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè, a professor at the school of management at Bocconi University in Milan. “Spain has been on a more robust and convincing growth trajectory than Italy since at least 2011, so this has been coming.”

Italy’s stagnation is one of the main causes of the country’s increasingly bitter political divisions, with the electorate losing faith in the ability of its traditional parties to create jobs and restore growth. Anti-establishment and protest parties emerged as the big winners of Italy’s inconclusive general election last month, where voters deserted more moderate centre-left and centre-right forces.

Italy’s underperformance — and in particular any threat to its ability to service its debt, the largest in the eurozone after Greece’s relative to the size of the economy — is also seen as one of the biggest risks for the single-currency area.

Without structural economic improvement Italy “continues to pose a latent threat to the euro area”, said Lieven Noppe, senior economist at KBC, in a recent note.

The fact that Spain has overtaken Italy owes more to Italy’s problems than Spain’s economic progress, which has only recently gathered pace.

While Spain has been expanding at a faster rate than France, Germany and the UK since 2015, its economy is only 2 per cent larger than at the start of 2008 — a weaker recovery than in all other leading EU economies except Italy.

Román Escolano, the Spanish economy minister, told the Financial Times on Thursday: “The latest results of the Spanish economy are good and encouraging, the latest forecasts from institutions like the IMF as well, but there is still a lot to do. There are still a lot of jobs to create, and we are working on it.”

Mr Carnevale Maffè said Spain had some key structural advantages, such as a younger population, but had also been able to make public investments more effectively than Italy, particularly in infrastructure, and was more open to innovation and foreign investment.

At the end of the 1990s, Italy — which now has almost 15m more people than Spain — had an economy twice as large as that of Spain. It is now only 50 per cent larger and the difference is expected to shrink even further in the next five years.

Italy’s economic performance “has been poor since 1999”, said Jack Allen, economist at Capital Economics.

Italy’s economy is still only marginally larger than in 2000 while other leading EU economies have expanded by 25 per cent or more. Spain’s total output is 35 per cent larger than in 2000.

Separate data from the OECD show that Italy is one of the few big economies that has not yet regained its pre-crisis levels — with a rapidly ageing population, lagging productivity, a cumbersome bureaucracy and high state debt contributing to its poor long-term performance.

The IMF said Italian growth of 1.5 per cent last year was the fastest since 2010 and said it expected growth to strengthen this year.

However, the election results might mean “that bold reforms are unlikely to materialise” and Italy’s growth potential and outlook “will likely remain below that of its European peers”, said Massimo Bassetti, economist at FocusEconomics, in an analysts’ note.

Back in 1997, Italy was the 18th richest economy on a per capita basis among the countries for which the IMF has a complete data set. After 10 years, its ranking dropped 10 positions — and it has now slipped five more positions in the decade to 2017.

By 2023 Italy is expected to be only the 37th richest country on a per capita basis.

Additional reporting by James Politi in Rome and Michael Stothard in Madrid

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