The Minister of Economy, Alícia Romero, has assured that the Catalan government is "negotiating and working" with the Spanish government so that the investment executed in Catalonia aligns with its contribution to GDP. She highlighted that state investment in Catalonia is advancing "upwards", although she acknowledged that in Plaça Sant Jaume they "would like the increase to be more significant". In parallel, she boasted about the "solutions to try to improve this execution" that Salvador Illa's party has put on the table, among which she pointed out the Investment Consortium.Among the Junts ranks, the figure was received with indignation. The party's president in Parliament, Mònica Sales, described the underinvestment as a "premeditated asphyxiation that is increasingly blatant and unsustainable" which "has become a state policy, whoever governs, against Catalonia".
Catalonia receives 8.6% of the investment made by the Spanish government in the communities
The State invested €162 for each Catalan and €452 for each Madrid resident
BarcelonaCatalonia once again finds itself among the communities to which the State allocates the fewest resources. According to reports that the Ministry of Finance sent this Friday to political parties and Congress, and to which ARA has had access, the Spanish government spent 8.6% of the total investment it executed in 2025 in autonomous communities in Catalonia. It is the year in which it receives the smallest slice of the pie in the last ten years, a period during which Catalonia has received between 9% and 13% of the investments carried out by the central executive.
In parallel, last year Madrid concentrated more than 20% of the investments carried out by the State. If we analyze the resources that the central administration spent per person, while each Catalan received 162.62 euros, each Madrileño received 452.31 euros. In the Spanish global, the State disbursed 312.75 euros per person. The Canary Islands is the only territory that has a lower per capita investment executed than Catalonia, without taking into account Ceuta and Melilla: each inhabitant of the archipelago has received 100.87 euros from Moncloa.
In 2025, Catalonia contributed 19% of Spanish GDP, which measures the wealth generated in a country. Based on this indicator, the director of the studies department of the Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona, Joan Ramon Rovira, estimates that an even larger proportion of what enters the Spanish public coffers comes from Catalonia. "We surely contribute 20%, or a little more, but what is certain is that we contribute no less than 19%," argues this expert in public sector economics.
According to Rovira, "the best" way to conduct a reliable analysis of the data is to move away from absolute numbers and establish comparable units of measurement. He proposes three magnitudes to contextualize the State's investment in each territory: in relation to the State's total expenditure, per capita investment, and the communities' GDP.
What slice of the pie does each community get?
In absolute terms, the executive led by Pedro Sánchez invested almost 15,365 million distributable among communities, to which must be added another 10,399 million that it cannot distribute by territories. Beyond the resources allocated to Madrid (20.94%) and Catalonia (8.6%), the Valencian Community received 11.31% of the invested money (1,737.78 million); Andalusia, 10.54% (1,619.76 million) and, Galicia, 10.28% (1,579.77 million). Only La Rioja, Ceuta and Melilla receive a share less than 1% of the State's investments in the communities.
Experts warn that figures "from a specific year can be very volatile" and recall that, to draw conclusions, a temporal perspective "of about five or ten years" must be established. "If they build a specific infrastructure, they spend a lot of money and, when they finish it, investment falls sharply," illustrates Rovira. According to calculations made by ARA based on the annual reports prepared by the ministry, Catalonia has received an average of 11.3% of the State's investment in the last decade, despite the annual increases and decreases it has experienced. The average investment in Madrid is approximately 19.7%.
If we look at it per inhabitant, the resources received by each Catalan increased by 64% in the last decade, while for each Madrilenian it more than doubled, with an increase of 163%. Per capita investment in Catalonia peaked in 2024, when it was around 175.84 euros, a figure close to the minimum allocated to Madrilenians, which was 157.16 euros in 2016.
Murcia is the community that receives the most resources (590.28 euros), followed by Galicia (581.92 euros), Aragon (525.12 euros), Castile and León (508.82 euros), and Cantabria (504 euros). The inhabitants of these communities exceed the 452.31 euros received by each Madrilenian. Rovira highlights that Madrid benefits from the capital effect – for example, the purchase of a building to house ministry offices counts as investment for the community just like a scholarship call for studies – and, in other communities, low population density becomes significant.
State investments in Catalonia, in the spotlight
The distribution of resources has always been in the spotlight of the relationship between Catalonia and Spain. Regarding the investments of the central government, the spotlight focuses on two different indicators: on the one hand, the spending that the State materializes with respect to what it had committed to, and on the other hand, the resources it allocates to Catalonia compared to the rest of the autonomies, especially Madrid, which has traditionally been the most favored. This year, we do not have the execution figures for the budgeted investment, because in 2025 there were no budgets in the State. Public finance planning has been extended since 2023, and specific modifications have been made to respond to the needs of each moment.
The debate on the budgetary execution of the State in Catalonia escalated in mid-2022, when the Spanish government acknowledged that had spent 35% of what it had promised to Catalonia. A few months later, in October, the Ministry of Finance stopped publishing the data on the execution of territorialized investment, when it was under the direction of María Jesús Montero, who later left the government to be the socialist candidate in the Andalusian elections of this 2026. The socialist government alluded to "technical difficulties" and, after months of delays, formalized the end of the publication of these reports when they were left out of the statistical calendar for the year 2024.