The Minister of Economy and Finance of Castilla y León, Carlos Fernández Carriedo, has called for a thorough review of the autonomous financing needs under equal conditions between all the communities, in a joint dialogue avoiding bilateral meetings between the Government and the autonomous regions.
Fernández Carriedo has participated in the conference ‘Autonomous Finance: pending issues’, organized by the Department of Autonomous Finance of the University of Vigo, with the Minister of Finance and Public Administration of the Xunta de Galicia, Miguel Corgos; the First Vice President and Minister of Finance and Public Administration of the Junta de Extremadura, Pilar Blanco-Morales; and the Minister of Finance and Economic Model of the Generalitat Valenciana, Vicent Soler; in a round table entitled ‘The Pending Reform: on emergencies and patches’.
In his speech, the Minister of Economy and Finance of the Junta de Castilla y León defended the urgency and priority of undertaking a profound reform of the autonomous financing system that provides the Community with sufficient resources to attend to essential quality public services and under conditions of equality.
“A review of the regional financing system has been called for, long before the impact of the pandemic, since the resources that reached Castilla y León are insufficient,” said Fernández Carriedo.
In addition, he highlighted that the current system has led to a setback in the financing of the Community , so it is necessary to take into account the established peculiarities of Castilla y León with a greater weight of demographic variables, such as territorial extension, dispersion , the low density or the aging of the population, which have a significant impact on the higher cost of providing public services, and are clearly undervalued in the current model.
Announcement of the CPFF
Fernández Carriedo has demanded the urgency of a call for the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council with three issues to be dealt with in relation to the services provided by the Community.
In the first place, there are public services specifically linked to the population (Health, Education and Social Services) that are provided in their place of residence, with particular geographic and demographic characteristics that significantly condition their organization and provision, and they affect both their cost and the access of citizens to them . In the case of Castilla y León, the provision of these essential public services has a higher cost due to its territorial extension, dispersion, low density or the aging of the population, which must be compensated in the new system.
There are other public services whose provision is directly linked to the territory, such as maintenance of roads , forest area or biodiversity, telecommunications and cultural heritage, among others, which must be weighed appropriately based on not strictly population criteria.
Castilla y León will request additional resources to face depopulation, which provide stable and dynamic financing to low-density territories and which reflect a clear commitment against depopulation and the demographic challenge. Really, the true commitment against depopulation must be manifested in regional financing.
The Network of Researchers in Autonomous Financing and Financial Decentralization in Spain is a project devised and managed by a research group from the University of Vigo that started in 2013. Its origin can be found in a summer course at the Menéndez Pelayo International University held in 2016, which later became the Conference on Fiscal Federalism and Decentralization in Spain, organized periodically since 2008. All this collective work has given rise to different books published by the Institute of Fiscal Studies of the Ministry of Finance and Public Administrations, and different publications of Spanish economy edited by Funcas.
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