The fallacy of equal opportunities in Spain
Why does a resident of the Balearics receive €3,000 less per year in social services than someone in Asturias?
While the main Spanish politicians subscribe to the rhetoric of equality, and label anyone who asks for an improvement in regional financing as lacking in solidarity, the figures show that the current system for allocating resources in Spain is seriously flawed. Not only that: it is profoundly lacking in solidarity, it promotes inequality, it is inefficient, and it punishes the most dynamic economies. A study presented yesterday by the BBVA Foundation and the Valencian Institute for Economic Research (IVIE) --clearly, neither of which supports Catalan independence-- shows that equality of opportunity is a chimera in a Spain, where a resident of Asturias receives 3,000 euros more per year towards social services than one from the Balearic Islands, €2,800 more than one from Valencia, and €1,890 more than a Catalan.
How can such an abysmal deviation be explained, for a community such as Asturias, which does not have a special financial agreement with Madrid nor a standard of living that would account for this difference? There is no logical explanation. The authors of the study state that "differences in spending on basic public services in excess of 60% are largely incompatible with equal opportunity of access to social services". And they add that these differences are not due to "different needs", which would make sense, but rather to "different financial resources", which are the product of "historical and political reasons, such as ancient charters, or the early assessment of devolved powers". For this reason, the experts that penned the report call for --among other things-- a new, more equitable system of regional financing.
The report also reveals that city councils are the administrations that have had to cut their budgets the most, up to 30%, and that the pillar of the welfare state most affected by these cutbacks is education, which today has fewer resources than it had in 2002. All this together paints a picture of an uneven Spain, where the Mediterranean regions are punished, and where resources are not allocated to the people who most need them or to the people who generate them, but to those who benefit from a system that is both opaque and biased.