The financing system will distribute record resources next year

The autonomous communities will receive next year “the largest payment on account that they have had throughout their history.” This was announced yesterday by the Minister of Finance and Public Administration, María Jesús Montero, after the meeting she held with the regional councilors of the branch to inform them of the amount of the advances that the State will transfer to them for the next financial year. This meeting is the starting signal for the regional governments and also the municipalities to start designing their budgets.

The communities will obtain 134,335.6 million euros from the financing system next year, which is 24% more than this year, that is, 26,130 million more. This set of resources provided by the financing system is distributed in part through record payments on account amounting to 124,291.8 million euros, 11% more, and the “very positive” settlement of the year 2021, which reaches 10,980 .6 million euros; that is, the difference between the estimated income received by the communities (delivery on account) and the actual income at the end of the year, which is settled with a two-year lag, as required by law. From the sum of both concepts, it is necessary to subtract, as usual, 936.8 million from the negative liquidations of the years 2008 and 2009. The result that it yields is more than 26,000 million that will go to the communities so that they prepare the 2023 budgets, according to Montero said.

More spending margin

The head of the Treasury explained that the total resources of the communities are the result, in part, of the improvement in collection in 2021, since despite the fact that inflation had remained at 3%, there was an unexpected collection of 8,000 million , as well as the cautious forecasts of the Government, the measures adopted and this “strong job creation”.

In addition, Montero transferred to the regional governments the relaxation of the deficit objective of the autonomous communities from 0.1% to 0.3% of GDP in 2023. The Minister of Economy and Finance of the Region, Luis Alberto Marín, was the only representative of the communities who demanded from the minister “the urgent celebration” of a new Fiscal and Financial Policy Council “in which the much-needed reform of this obsolete and unfair financing model is dealt with exclusively”. Marín denounced that this is the fourth meeting of this body “in which a matter of enormous importance for the inhabitants of the Region of Murcia and the country as a whole is systematically left out.”

The counselor estimated the impact that the increase in the deficit from 0.1% to 0.3% next year could have at around 65 million, but considered it a “specific and conjunctural measure that does not solve the real underlying issue, and is that there are regions that have been receiving less money for more than a decade than we need to provide quality services».