The Finnova Foundation places the Valencian Community at the bottom of the Spanish regions for its execution of the European structural funds. In a ranking prepared with open data from the European Commission, the entity places the Community in third place, with the third worst absorption rate in the entire State, improving only the data for the Community of Madrid and Catalonia. The percentage of the Valencian Community remains around 43%.
The budget available to the Community with these funds amounts to 3,338 million euros, but it has not yet executed 1,900 million euros belonging to these funds, 57%. In detail, the performance of the Valencian Community regarding funds from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD) is the most satisfactory, with 84% of the budget granted and 63% executed.
The data is more pessimistic with respect to the other structural funds, those of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the European Social Fund (ESF). In the case of the FEDER, the entire budget has been granted, although only 42% has been executed, and the ESF data is even more concise, with 79% granted and 32% executed.
What are the funds used for? In the case of the EAFRD, the implementation of agricultural advisory services to 650 owners is contemplated, although without any percentage of execution. There is also aid for rural development cooperation, but although in 2020 and 2021 progress was made in this aid, in 2022 there have been no operations in this regard.
Also included in this fund is aid for the production of renewable energy. Budgeted, here the Valencian Community had 800,000 euros of investment (private and public) in the production of renewable energy, but today only 500,000 euros of that budget have been implemented and 74,928 euros remain to be planned. On the other hand, in support of ecological agriculture, 206% of what was budgeted has been implemented. These are just two examples of so many that can be seen on the European Commission website, which updates the data based on the communication made by the different regions.
From the Finnova Foundation they explain that the seriousness of the data does not reside only in the amount or the percentage, but in the fact that the term to absorb the funds ends on December 31 of this year. "Despite the fact that the structural funds have a rule (rule 3) that allows declaring expenses related to projects up to three years after the period, the State shows data that puts it behind the EU, and with barely four months that allow the situation to be reversed," they warn.
The reasons for the low percentages of execution lie, according to the same sources, in the complexity of the projects and the poor preparation of the administrative staff to deal with it, and it has an impact on the image that Europe has of Spain's management capacity. And it is that as a whole, Spain still has 32,000 million euros without executing these structural funds 2014-2020.
In the case of the Community, the aging of the Administration staff is one of the structural problems of the Valencian economy, denounced by the Ivie which, in a recent analysis of the Valencian economy, which also came to say that the The number of public employees in relation to the population they serve is 6% lower in the Valencian Community than in the rest of Spain.
