The Valencian Institute of Economic Research (IVIE) will collaborate with the Generalitat Valenciana in the design of a spending evaluation system “with the objective of ensuring the greatest efficiency in the management of public resources by the Generalitat” as stated yesterday by the Minister of Finance, Ruth Merino. This work will be carried out within the framework of the recently created Interdepartmental Commission on Efficiency in Public Spending.
The IVIE will help define up to 70 reference indicators that will be used to evaluate the efficiency of public spending of all departments and the degree of compliance with their budgetary objectives. “Our obligation as public managers is not only to detect the needs of citizens and decide how much and what is spent to satisfy them, but to subsequently analyze whether we are really achieving it,” according to the councilor.
Merino also indicated that this is something that the Ombudsman had been asking for year after year, and that it is now necessary because the underfinancing that has accompanied the Community for years is combined with “this return to fiscal rules”, after several years suspended due to the pandemic.
“With all this, we are going to demand and evaluate ourselves with a system of indicators, objective data and comparisons, which we will then analyze in order to make the appropriate decisions with the aim of seeing not only if we have spent more, less or the same as budgeted, but if what we really want is being achieved,” he said.
As examples, he has indicated that it will be possible to analyze how many graduates from Valencian universities are carrying out a professional job for which they have been trained 4 or 5 years after graduating, or whether the increase in doctors in Primary Care is really impacting a decrease. of waiting lists.
Merino assured that the Consell is doing its job, and asked the Government to do its job, and to “get going with the reform of the regional financing system.” In this sense, he questioned the Minister of Science and new leader of the PSPV, Diana Morant, who demands loyalty to Mazón, “when she is the one who is being disloyal to the Valencians because she has us doubly punished, on the one hand without fair financing that corresponds to us and on the other hand maintaining high taxes”.
The councilor asked Morant to “be loyal to the Valencians” and demand that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, reform the financing system and the temporary leveling fund.
At the meeting, the members of the commission, coordinated by the regional Secretary of Finance, Eusebio Monzó, analyzed the background regarding the evaluation of public policies, set its objectives and established the calendar of the working groups. The work of the commission, which will meet biweekly, will be carried out on two levels to provide a guide to good practices in the efficiency of this expenditure.
On the one hand, an exhaustive analysis of the last settled budget of all the communities will be carried out, using the homogenized data published by the Ministry of Finance. The objective of this first level is to compare how each community spends, both by economic and functional lines.
Secondly, the expenditure incurred by all the departments will be analyzed, with special emphasis on those that concentrate the highest percentage of budgetary resources (Health, Education and Social Services), based on a series of reference indicators that will set the departments themselves.
On the other hand, the Ivie presented the main conclusions of the study for the implementation of a Strategic Plan for the Evaluation of Public Spending Policies of the Valencian Public Sector, carried out in 2021 by researchers Juan Pérez and José Antonio Pérez.
This study includes a series of proposals to advance in the field of evaluating the efficiency of public spending and proposes carrying out a pilot study with a specific budget program to subsequently extend it to the rest of the programs. This work, which already established some evaluation indicators of spending on Education, will serve as a basis for the departments to establish their respective indicators in coordination with the Ivie.
