The Minister of Economy’s plan for El Prat airport will be the one that comes out of “technical work that will identify the options to increase intercontinental flights”. She did not give more details during the discussion that she held in the Cercle with the vice president of the entity, Nuria CabutÃ. For this reason, the options may not involve expansion works, but only the relocation of take-off and landing spaces.
He began his speech at the Cercle in a similar tone to the one used the day before by President Pere Aragonès. “The Catalan economy is moving in the right direction,” he said before rejecting the “defeatism that is not justified and that does not help anyone.” According to the head of Economy, “we have to accept the criticism but we have to stop the apocalyptic speeches.”
In the colloquium, she was asked about the impact of the flight of companies. She downplayed her effects and even assured that Madrid had lost more but made no reference to the fact that in the case of Catalonia almost all of the Ibex and most of the large ones had left. But she stressed that the “vast majority” of these transfers of headquarters did not involve worker movements and that this entire process had “less impact than it seemed.”
During his speech he lamented the fiscal deficit in Catalonia, which he estimated at 18,000-20,000 million euros per year. In his opinion, the magnitude of these figures show that if “the Catalan economy and its public services are where they are, it is almost heroic.” He also recalled the lack of investment in infrastructure and the low budget execution. For this reason, he warned that the Ministry of Finance has once again delayed the publication of investment data for 2022, which was scheduled for Tuesday, for another semester. He recalled that since 2015 the average execution of investments in State infrastructure in Madrid is 122% and in Catalonia 62%: “The fact that these differences are so persistent and differential can only be explained by a deliberate decision” that harms all catalans. But he also criticized non-compliance with the Law on Financing of the Autonomous Communities (Lofca) and the distribution of the deficit authorized by the EU for 2024.
The minister explained that in the new geostrategic context, Europe seeks more industrial, technological and energy sovereignty. For this reason, projects in emerging sectors such as chip manufacturing, quantum technologies and bioengineering, among others, are mostly developed.