The Ministry of Finance has today published the raw data to calculate fiscal balances. The decision is part of the agreement that the Government sealed with Junts to be able to carry out the anti-crisis and omnibus decree at the beginning of the year.
The data so that researchers and organizations, including public administrations, can calculate fiscal balances have not been updated for more than 10 years. The last time that the Generalitat of Catalonia was able to carry out an official calculation on the fiscal balance was in 2014, with data from 2011. A decade ago the Government concluded that “in the period 1986 – 2011, Catalonia, on average, of an annual fiscal deficit of 8% of GDP”.
The Government, in order to be able to approve the validation of both decrees, agreed to publish those figures that the Catalan parties have been demanding from the Ministry of Finance for years. Since then, the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IEF) has been working on the preparation of these raw data that the ministry will reveal today. That is, the Treasury will not publish the fiscal balances, but will put official data on the table so that the Generalitat or independent researchers can proceed to calculate them.
The first vice president and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, explained after the agreement with the Junts parliamentary group that the Government would make data available so that research centers, administrations and study services can prepare their own fiscal balances, since There is no consensus on the methodology to follow.
The number two of the Government defended the “transparency” of the Executive and said that the Ministry of Finance had no problems in making this information public.
“What we are going to do is open this source of information so that those who investigate within this framework, the administrations that want to do so, can have access to this data,” added Montero.
Junts advances that it will analyze the official data published by the Government with experts to calculate the fiscal balances. The formation opts at this time for caution and to verify whether the Treasury “has presented all the information necessary to carry out the calculation.” Junts adds that the data should be kept open to allow experts (academics, technicians, etc.) to reach conclusions.
The Generalitat, for its part, considers that the information published today “does not provide anything new” and that the Government will demand that the central government disseminate more data. “The information that the Generalitat has been asking the State for years is to publish in which territory the State allocates each spending program. This has not been published today,” he adds.
Specifically, Catalonia denounces that 102,000 million of State spending is not specified in which territories it is spent. “Due to the volume they represent, having this data is a key factor for calculating fiscal balances,” defends the Generalitat.
“Until now we had the investment allocation distributed by ministries. Today, the only difference is that the published information is distributed by investment programs. But the result is the same as what was already public,” added Government sources.
For Catalonia, taking as a reference the latest estimates from the Department of Economy and Finance, Catalonia’s fiscal balance with the State was already almost 22,000 million euros in 2021, equivalent to 9.6% of GDP. “An imbalance that the Generalitat is working to reverse with a unique financing proposal that it will present soon,” adds the Government.
