Washington, Apr 12 (IANS/EFE): Spain will emerge from the current crisis with a much healthier economy, Spanish power giant Iberdrola's CEO, Jose Ignacio Sanchez Galan, said Thursday during an event at Harvard University.

Sanchez Galan is in the US to present "Spain: A Land of Opportunities", a report from the Spanish Business Council for Competitiveness, or CEC, which comprises more than a dozen of the Iberian nation's leading companies.

Despite Spain's current economic woes, it is ranking as one of the world's 10 "most-promising" countries for foreign direct investment, the executive said.

The flexibilization introduced through decisive reforms and historic reductions in public spending and private debt, coupled with a surge in exports, is transforming Spain's economy and its international image, Sanchez Galan said.

"In the past we were so dependent on a single product, construction, that it was not health. Now we are making efforts so that after this crisis, we have an economy of much healthier growth," the Iberdrola chief said.

The CEC report predicts the Spanish economy will begin to grow again in 2014, if not sooner, and notes that the level of knowledge-based assets as a percentage of the gross domestic product in Spain was 25.8 percent, not much below the 29.5 percent of GDP in Anglo-Saxon countries