Salvador Illa, PSC candidate for the presidency of the Generalitat of Catalonia in the elections of May 12, stated in an interview at the Col·legi d’Economistes that the budget of the Catalan Water Agency (ACA) has had “execution levels of 22%” in the middle of the drought. It’s misleading. The execution of the ACA budget is one of the topics of the campaign and several candidates have raised it because it has been at a minimum for years, but the data on 2023 investments was not published until this Monday, April 29. As of 2021, the agency’s execution is around 60%.
The PSC has explained to Verificat that its candidate’s figure refers to the 2023 accounts, and is obtained by subtracting from the total budget the chapters intended to pay fixed expenses, that is, staff payrolls and current expenses (water , light, cleaning…), but it does not reach 22% either. Execution, in this case, stands at 32% in 2023, four points above 2021 and 2022.
“The executed budget is an expression that we all use with a precise meaning: total of the executed budget,” Ernest Pons, professor of Applied Economics at the University of Barcelona (UB), explains in an email to Verificat. That is, the generic expression used by Illa would point to the ACA’s generic accounts for 2023, when execution was actually 61.3%. For 2021 and 2022, the other drought years, according to an analysis by the Department of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda, the execution was 58.9% and 59.9% respectively, according to the data published in the ACA website.
In 2023, the highest budgets of the last 10 years were presented, but their execution in absolute terms was lower than that of 2016 and 2019.
With the calculation made by the PSC, the data does not add up either. If we deduct the agency’s fixed expenses from the budget, as proposed by the party’s press office, the level of execution of the ACA in 2023 stands at 32%. For 2021 and 2022 the proportion was even lower, 28%. Together with that of 2018 (30%), these are the lowest executions since at least 2014.
In absolute terms, 2018 and 2020 recorded lower execution than the last three years.
For Guillem López, professor of Economics at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona (UPF), “when we talk about execution, we normally talk about investments”, that is, the “real” investment of the ACA, mainly in infrastructure. If we focus on this budget chapter, the picture changes. Execution was 50.3% in 2021 and 2023, and 43.7% in 2022, similar proportions, on average, to those of previous years.
In absolute terms, however, the executed budget has been higher than ever: no year since 2014 (when the detailed ACA data begins) has as much been invested in infrastructure as in recent years.
Something similar happens if we look at investments and capital transfers, the other option to which the expert understands that Illa could be referring. The executed budget was much lower than the forecast (33.5%, 34.5% and 45.4%, for 2021, 2022 and 2023, respectively), but the absolute figures far exceeded the execution of any other year with data.
