The Ministry of Development proposes taking advantage of the flood of retirements in the administration to modernize it.

BarcelonaFoment del Treball presented this Monday the second report of the cycle Business growth and good jobs: The role of the public sector, in which he proposed that the administration take advantage of the flood of retirements that will occur in the coming years to "modernize" and take advantage of the opportunities offered by new technologies.

"In the next 10 years, a very profound renewal of public servants will be proposed because around 30-40% of civil servants in Catalonia will retire," noted the president of the employers' association, Josep Sánchez Llibre, "and we believe that this creates an opportunity for public administrations to modernize and become more efficient and agile."

During the presentation, which was also attended by the executive vice president of the Institute for Strategic Studies (IEE), Jordi Alberich, and the coordinator of the series, former minister of the Generalitat (Catalan Government), Felip Puig, the possibility of creating new roles within the administration was also emphasized: "I take advantage of jobs with better salaries, and make the administration a more skillful organization."

In this sense, Sánchez Llibre insisted that, if the private sector has done it, the public sector should also be able to: "If companies have been able to modernize, the administration should be able to do so as well. The more competitive and productive we are, the more capacity we will have to pay high salaries," he stated. However, he stressed that this "does not mean replacing 30 percent of retired civil servants with AI," but rather that the administration should modernize as companies have done, with new professional profiles that speak the language of new technologies.

Avoid low-cost economics

Felip Puig explained that these proposals arise from the desire of businessmen to "reverse the dangerous tendency of Western societies to move towards a low cost", that is, of low added value.

According to Puig, the replacement of industrial capitalism with financial capitalism, and also with the technological capitalism that is coming, entails the need "for a reindustrialization in which the public sector plays a relevant role" in its roles as regulator, contractor, employer of workers, investor, and strategic guide.

Some of the report's requests include creating a data consortium between administrations, further decentralization through technological systems, and reducing red tape to "attract investment and avoid missing out on opportunities."