Spanish Minister for Finance committed to republishing autonomous communities’ “fiscal balances”

Madrid (ACN).- The difference between what an autonomous community produces in terms of wealth and thus revenues and what it finally receives, once the Spanish State has redistributed the revenues, is a complicated and controversial figure to obtain in Spain. Solidarity from richer areas is not officially quantified in a systematic way, which leads to all kinds of speculations and calculations. Richer regions, such as Catalonia, may not see its solidarity effort recognised by others. The Spanish Government published the data once in 2005 for the period of 2002-2005. The result was that Catalonia had a large fiscal deficit during those years. The figure was contested by many from Catalonia and the rest of Spain, some increasing it and some lowering it down.  The Spanish Government stopped publishing them but recognised that Catalonia had a historical fiscal deficit. A large part of the Catalan political and economic class considers that this deficit goes beyond an acceptable concept of solidarity, which they do not question but they would like to put concrete limit. The Spanish Economic Vice President and Minister for Finance, Elena Salgado, announced that the fiscal balances will be published again, after a question from the Catalan Nationalist group in the Spanish Parliament.

However, Salgado alerted that the different methods of calculation may produce different results, and thus she said that “the balances do not explain any reality”. Nevertheless, Salgado has announced that the Spanish Government will publish them for the years 2006-2009. She answered a petition from the spokesman of the Centre-Right Catalan Nationalist Party (CiU) in the Spanish Parliament, Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida. According to Duran, in 2010 the Spanish State in did not execute 26.5% of the budgeted expenditure, “which means that of 4 years, 1 is for free”.