BarcelonaThe entities that make up the so-called business G8—Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and the other Catalan chambers, the College of Economists, the Cercle d’Economia, Pimec, FemCAT, Barcelona Global, Racc and the Fira de Barcelona—, and together with Foment del Treball, have drawn up a joint manifesto on the new financing model presented by the Spanish government at the beginning of the month, in which they state that the proposal agreed by the executive of Pedro Sánchez and ERC “is not may consider sufficient”. After the harsh statement issued a few days ago by Foment – the employers’ association that groups the big Catalan companies -, in which it called the proposal “clearly insufficient”, now the G8 entities are approaching Foment’s criticisms in an agreed text.
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The text points out that the proposal “represents an important improvement compared to the current model, although it cannot be considered sufficient, since it only answers some of the demands claimed by the undersigned entities in the note of March 5, 2024”. Thus, he considers that it is “a starting point to achieve greater levels of justice and transparency in territorial funding, although it is far from the self-government quotas to which Catalonia aspires”. At the same time, the entities urge the Catalan parties “to work together to improve the proposed model and ensure that the changes are consolidated in the future”. Sources from the ARA assure that the text has been promoted by the G8, with special involvement of the Chamber of Commerce chaired by Josep Santacreu, and that “it has been in the making for weeks”. After collecting the amendments to the draft from the rest of the G8 actors, the same sources point out that the Chamber itself was the one that contacted Foment to join the manifesto.
The proposal to reform the regional financing model, presented publicly by the Ministry of Finance on January 9, would mean the receipt of around 4.7 billion euros per year for Catalonia. As expected, the reform was applauded by the PSC and ERC, but it received criticism on the one hand from Junts per Catalunya, which considers it too unambitious and does not provide an answer to the financial problems of the Generalitat, and on the other from the PP and Vox, which call it a concession by the State government to the demands of Catalan independence.
In addition, the fact that Foment made a statement on its own in which it criticized the proposal strained relations between the employers’ association and the Catalan Government, and especially between the president of the employers’ association, the former leader of Unió Democràtica Josep Sánchez Llibre, and the president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa. In this sense, after the publication of the manifesto, the Minister of Economy, Alicia Romero, celebrated “that Foment has rectified and is part of the consensus”. Romero acknowledges that “we need to continue working to improve regulatory capacity and tax management”, and assures that they are “working” for all this.
Criteria and investment deficit
In the manifesto published this Thursday, the main criticisms made by business entities of the model are, on the one hand, the redistribution and the adjustment criteria, which they consider “are debatable” and that “the cost of living is still not taken into account to ensure that the purchasing power of the allocations received is similar in each territory”. “The non-incorporation of the cost of living as an adjustment criterion is an important shortcoming of the new system. It implies that with nominally similar resources, the real ability to provide public services can differ significantly between territories. Therefore, it reduces the effective ability to guarantee equal access to public services,” the text points out.
With regard to the already famous concept of regularity – the fact that an autonomous community does not end up receiving less money than others that contribute less to the common fund -, the manifesto also points to shortcomings: “in addition to improving the coherence and justice of the system, with the available information it seems that the new proposal respects the principle of regularity for Catalonia, calculated with an adjusted population, at least for the year 2027”, the document indicates. However, the entities criticize that “although the logic of the proposal is built around the principle of adjusted population, (…) it should be noted that [el principi d’ordinalitat] it would not be met in terms of real population (according to the register)”. Thus, they consider that “it is necessary to ensure that the regularity per adjusted inhabitant continues to be met beyond 2027; given that the new model does not guarantee this, this should be one of the priority areas for improvement to be taken into account,” the text adds.
Among the key points to take into account, the manifesto also mentions the deficit of investments in infrastructure, although it is not directly linked to the financing model, an element that these days is particularly hot in the current economic situation after the railway collapse of the last few days, the result of low state investment in Catalonia. In this sense, the text suggests that increasing the State’s investments in Catalonia, “in line with its weight in GDP and its status as the economic engine of the State as a whole, is an equally effective way that simultaneously contributes to the reduction of the fiscal deficit and the improvement of the country’s progress and well-being”. The situation of Catalan infrastructures “is critical, as it is at present, highlighting an accumulated deficit of infrastructures for a value similar to that of the Generalitat’s annual budget”, a figure that Foment places at around 42,500 million euros.
As a conclusion, the manifesto considers that this new model “must be understood as a starting point that represents an improvement over the current one, but it is not sufficient in certain aspects that should be developed if we want to respond to the claims that have historically been made from Catalonia”. In addition, they emphasize that it is a model “that can be extended to the set of autonomous communities under a common regime and all of them can benefit from it”. “They do not understand, in this sense, many of the criticisms that have been made of the proposal based on the fact that it arises from the pact between Catalan parties and the central government”, they claim.
