The investiture agreements that the PSOE signed with ERC and Junts lack the most elementary economic memory and thus avoid putting figures to what constitutes, according to the experts consulted by elEconomista.es, a real financial time bomb for the Spanish Administrations.
Specifically, analysts are already alarmed at a cost of at least 42,500 million euros, capable of raising the overall public debt by three points of GDP and the deficit by a similar amount (although more difficult to estimate in the latter case).
As was foreseeable, the bulk of this impact comes, on the one hand, from the dismantling of the common regime financing system (agreed this week with Junts) and, on the other hand, from the reduction of the liabilities contracted by Catalonia with the FLA and other similar financing mechanisms put in place by the State (achieved by Esquerra).
In the first case, the possibility of ceding all the tax collection to the Generalitat leaves in the air about 20,000 million (50% of the taxes now collected in that territory). Not in vain the document signed by the party of Carles Puigdemont and the Socialists does not define what compensation the State would receive for the services it provides in Catalonia. In other words, everything remains to be clarified as to how it would be articulated, for the Catalan case, a kind of quota in the style of the one to which the Basque Country is already subject.
But the Catalan fiscal self-determination that is making headway does not stop there. Its impact must also be considered with regard to the approximately 7,000 million that the Govern contributes (on average) to the solidarity mechanisms with the rest of the autonomous regions now provided for in the current regional financing system. This contribution, however, has been greatly reduced in recent years.