The agreement on the singular financing model agreed upon by the PSC and ERC parties on the occasion of President Illa's investiture placed great importance on achieving regional financing that respected the principle of ordinality for the Generalitat of Catalonia; that is, that no autonomous community would receive fewer public resources than the communities that had contributed the least. Implicitly, it also means forgoing receiving more public resources than the communities that had contributed the most. The principle is simple and can be calculated very well. It involves ensuring that contributions of public resources to the central state treasury do not change order when they are redistributed. The concept public resources It is essential. During the 2009 negotiation of the financing model, and when Minister Solbes was still responsible for the economy of President Rodríguez Zapatero's government, Solbes reassured him about the application of the principle of ordinality, which the Generalitat had so strongly demanded, assuring him that per capita GDP would not change after the implementation of the financing model. This was a mixture of apples and pears, given that private resources do not come into play when discussing ordinality in the distribution of public resources. The contributions of public resources must be compared with their redistribution. Redistribution is progressive when the differences between the largest and smallest contributors narrow, but this is not what happens in Spain: the autonomous communities with the largest contributions remain far behind in public funding compared to many regions that have contributed the least.
Ordinality is very important—the most important thing in a financing model that proclaims itself to be supportive but also respectful of the Spanish Constitution. However, the lack of ordinality is not the only inequity of the model. We must never forget that the same euros do not have the same purchasing and contracting power in the different territories of the State. This has been reiterated every time the minimum interprofessional wage (SMI) increases, and many Madrid economic newspapers lament the injustice and ineffectiveness of setting the same SMI across the State, given that average provincial wages are very different, and in many cases are very close to the SMI. This is the problem of purchasing power parity (PPP). It is a political taboo, but it is the economic law best known to all civil servants. Regardless of family ties, the cost of living is what stretches or shrinks the salary received, which, despite being the same across the State—or very similar—varies greatly between destinations.
The last job (number 30), which was published some time ago (2024), from the Monograph series of the Department of Economy and Finance of the Generalitat of Catalonia, offers extremely valuable research on the subject, which has already been addressed by the authors themselves in previous works: Estimation of Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) for the Autonomous Communities1. The authors make an indirect approximation, given that they lack the essential data to perform the direct calculation. This data is held by the INE (National Institute of Statistics and Census), which needs it to calculate the national CPI. The INE only reports variations in the regional or provincial CPIs, but it could not calculate a CPI for the entire country without being able to aggregate its territorial components. To perform this aggregation, it must know the prices of all territories and be able to transform them into a single figure. This weighting is the basis for calculating purchasing power parity. It has it, but does not report it. Furthermore, it deploys an entire strategy of concealment to avoid providing the key to how to recalculate the CPI for the entire country.
The estimates I mentioned are moderate enough to have been accepted by experts. In fact, everyone suspects that a direct measure—that is, the one kept in the vault by the INE presidency—would be more extreme. The authors place Catalonia's PPP at 106.44% (Spain = 100), and the autonomous community with the lowest PPP would be Castilla-La Mancha, with 86.24%.
Let's not fool ourselves. The more we document our complaint, the greater the resistance to correcting it on the part of the central government and the other autonomous communities. Not even the other communities that suffer from phenomena similar to ours—albeit to a lesser extent—say anything. But let's not forget that there is the possibility of appealing to the Constitutional Court, seeking protection for the violation of Article 138.2 of the Spanish Constitution, which states: "Differences between the statutes of the various autonomous communities may not, under any circumstances, entail economic or social privileges." What was anticipated against Catalonia could become a weapon in the defense of the well-being of the Catalan citizenry.
