Yesterday the Ministry of Finance published the first raw data to be able to calculate the fiscal balances of the autonomous communities, so that it fulfills one of the commitments agreed with Junts to be able to validate in Congress the anti-crisis and omnibus decrees. The department led by María Jesús Montero specified that this is “initial” information and that over the next few weeks it will be making public new details for the calculation of territorialized accounts.
The publication of the first phase of the information necessary to build the fiscal balances corresponding to 2021 shows how Madrid is the community that receives the most investment from public companies in the whole State and where the expenditure of the ministries is the highest. 19.6% of the 4,422.8 million euros invested by public companies that year was made in Madrid, compared to 11.6% that arrived in Catalonia. In relation to the population, the investment per inhabitant in Madrid was 127 euros, and in Catalonia it was almost half that, 66 euros per citizen.
If you look at some of the items in detail, you can see how Madrid took more than half of the investment of Renfe operator in Spain in 2021. The public company invested 644.6 million, of which 54.6% they were spent in Madrid, ahead of Catalonia, with 14.1%. Of the rest of the State’s investment in railways, the high-speed Adif activity stands out. In 2021, 1,089.7 million were invested. The community that received the most resources was the Basque Country, with 174 million. 96.5 million were spent in Madrid, and 22.4 million in Catalonia.
The Treasury also provided data on the expenditure of the General Administration of the State. In this case, Madrid again leads the ranking with almost 700 million. The item that stands out the most is the creation of road infrastructure, with more than 200 million. Castilla y León is the next community, with almost 400 million, while Catalonia does not reach 200 million.
Despite the fact that some of the data collected by the fiscal balances had already been published in another format by the Treasury, they are now presented with another level of disaggregation. The director of Fedea, Ángel de la Fuente, who has been calculating fiscal balances for years, points out that the information “is far from sufficient to make the calculations correctly”.
For Junts, the information provided by the Treasury yesterday is a milestone. The formation led by Carles Puigdemont explained, however, that it will analyze and verify with experts whether the ministry “has presented all the information necessary to make the calculation” of the fiscal balances, a historical claim of Catalonia. The latest official data available is from 2011. Junts added that the figures should be kept open “to allow experts, such as academics and technicians, to reach conclusions”.
The Generalitat, for its part, considered that the information published by the Treasury did not bring any new developments and asked the central government for more data. “The information that the Generalitat has been asking the State for years is to publish in which territory it allocates the spending program”, explained the Government. “Until now, we had divided the investments by ministries. Today, the only difference is that the published information is divided by investment programs. But the result is the same”, said official sources. Specifically, Catalonia denounced that 102,000 million of State expenditure is not specified in the information provided yesterday by the Treasury.
For Catalonia, taking as a reference the latest estimates from the Department of Economy, the deficit with the State was already almost 22,000 million euros in 2021, equivalent to 9.6% of GDP. President Pedro Sánchez also answered yesterday at the control session in the Senate that the central government intends to propose a common financing model, and not a singular proposal for Catalonia.
The data that was published yesterday should allow researchers and public administrations to draw up fiscal balances through the system they consider most appropriate. Broadly speaking, there are two: cash flow and burden/profit.
