The Ministry of Finance yesterday published the first raw data to be able to calculate the fiscal balances of the autonomous communities, thus fulfilling one of the commitments agreed with Junts to be able to validate the anti-crisis and omnibus decrees in Congress. The department directed by María Jesús Montero specified that this is “baseline” information and that over the next few weeks it will release 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 entire State and where the spending of the ministries is 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 came to Catalonia. In relation to the population, the investment per inhabitant in Madrid was 127 euros and in Catalonia it was almost half: 66 euros per citizen.

If you go down into detail about some of the items, you can see how Madrid took more than half of the investment from Renfe, the operator in Spain in 2021. The public company invested 644.6 million, of which 54.6% was they spent in Madrid, ahead of Catalonia, with 14.1%. Of the rest of the State’s investment in railways, the activity of Adif high speed stands out. In 2021, 1,089.7 million were invested. The community that received the most resources was the Basque Country, with 174 million. In Madrid, 96.5 million were spent and in Catalonia, 22.4 million.

The Treasury also offered data on the spending of the General State Administration. In that case, Madrid once 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.

Although some of the data that includes 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 being sufficient to do the calculations correctly.”

For Junts, the information provided yesterday by the Treasury is a milestone. The training led by Carles Puigdemont explained, however, that it will analyze and verify with experts whether the Ministry “has presented all the information necessary to carry out the calculation” of the fiscal balances, a historic claim of Catalonia. The latest official data available dates back to 2011. Junts added that the figures should be kept open “to allow experts (academics, technicians, etc.) to reach conclusions.”

The Generalitat, for its part, considered that the information published by the Treasury does not provide new information and demanded more data from the central government. “The information that the Generalitat has been asking the State for years is to publish which territory it intends to spend its spending program on,” the Government explained. “Until now we had the investment allocation distributed by ministries. Today, the only difference is that the published information is distributed by investment programs. But the result is the same,” official sources stated. Specifically, Catalonia denounced that 102,000 million in State spending are 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 responded yesterday in the control session in the Senate that the Government intends to propose a common financing model, and not a singular proposal for Catalonia.

The data published yesterday should be able to allow researchers and public administrations to prepare fiscal balances through the system they consider most appropriate. There are two broadly speaking: monetary flow and charge/benefit.