The lack of details on the agreement signed at the end of July by the CPS and the ERC to appoint Salvador Illa as head of the Generalitat makes it difficult to predict what the impact of the agreed measures will be on the public accounts. However, the first analyzes already show a weakening of the State due to the so-called “Catalan quota” through which the tax administration of Catalonia would manage the collection of taxes for later. make a limited contribution to the common fund. One side effect of this change would be the complexity of responding to unexpected economic crises, such as those experienced over the past decade, according to Funcas.
This is one of the conclusions drawn by the researcher Santiago Lago Peñas in the latest edition of the Economic Information Papers which analyzes the pact between the Socialists and the Catalan Republicans in which the “full financial autonomy of the Catalan autonomous government” is placed as a central objective. , which breaks the pattern designed for the autonomous communities of the common regime. The text establishes that the Catalan entity would begin to replace the National Tax Agency (AEAT) from 2025 with the management of personal income tax, which will increase its regulatory capacity and allow it to benefit of the evolution of transfers.
The study therefore assumes that there will be a reduction in the revenues of the central administration which would not only compromise the investments or policies to be developed in accordance with the general state budgets and the distribution of resources between the different autonomous communities, but it would also limit the ability to respond to “negative asymmetric shocks”. That is, crises that hit Spain differently from neighboring countries, as happened with the 2008 financial crisis or the coronavirus pandemic. The explanation is that this step will deepen the differences in the tax system of each region.
This transfer of the entire tax that taxes citizens’ income has no reference in other federal OECD countries and would limit the margin to define the progressivity of the Spanish tax system, establishing common distribution criteria for the entire territory or implement measures that affect the entire territory. population, so that the response to crises of an economic (or other) nature would also be conditioned. located at certain points on the autonomous mapas would be the case of DANA and its impact in Valencia.
“A decrease in the fiscal capacity of the Central Administration without the corresponding transfer of its financial debts would also negatively affect the balance between the volume of debt accumulated by the Central Administration and the tax base that supports it,” warns the economist, which leads to a deterioration of credit rating of Spanish sovereign debt, as this would increase the risk that it would not be able to meet the obligations acquired. Furthermore, it would open the door to “harmful competition” between regions via corporate taxes, which increases the risks of tax evasion.
