Catalonia will be one of the autonomous communities most benefited by the Spanish government's debt forgiveness – it will see some 17 billion eurosHowever, their headaches won't be entirely resolved, or at least that's what the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) predicts. AIReF has just calculated the implications of this debt forgiveness, should it be finally approved, for the financial health of each region. It's worth remembering that €83.252 billion is slated for forgiveness, representing 24.3% of the current regional debt (€342.804 billion). To begin with, the regional debt forgiveness will allow the regions to meet the legal limit, stipulated at 13% of GDP in 2029, as AIReF indicated this Wednesday. This means complying with this rule of the budget stability law twelve years ahead of schedule. Without the debt forgiveness, the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) estimated that the combined debt of the autonomous communities would reach the 13% of GDP limit in 2041. The total debt of the autonomous communities in the second quarter of 2025 (the latest period for which data is available) was 20.9% of GDP. With the debt forgiveness, it would fall to 15.9%. AIReF also explained that part of this debt reduction is due to the impact of eliminating interest payments. Specifically, the potential savings in interest for the regional governments would exceed €2.5 billion in the first year of the measure's implementation. By 2030, the accumulated savings would reach €15.6 billion, according to the agency's estimate. This figure is higher than that of the Ministry of Finance, which put the savings at just over €7 billion.

In July, the autonomous communities used to meet face-to-face with the Ministry of Finance. This month has always been a regular meeting of the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council (CPFF), the conclave that brings together the ministry and the regional ministers of the same rank. At the meeting, the Treasury announced the resources that the autonomous communities under the common system would have available the following year to prepare their budgets: the so-called advance payments or advances. Liquidity was also reported.

Exactly 16 years ago, on July 12, 2009, the then-Secretary General of the ERC (Republican Revolutionary Party), Joan Puigcercós, appeared before the press to announce his support for the financing agreement reached by Minister Antoni Castells and Vice President Elena Salgado. Puigcercós placed a small sign on the lectern with a figure: 3.855 billion euros, which was the estimated additional contribution the new system would make to the coffers of the Generalitat (Catalan Government). The subsequent economic crisis, and the resulting drop in tax revenue, effectively dashed these predictions.

The battle over the financing opened up following the agreement between the ERC and the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) to invest Salvador Illa is being played out on two parallel fronts: the first is tax collection, which focuses on ensuring that the Catalan Tax Agency manages all taxes, but starting with the most important, which is personal income tax. The second front is the distribution of resources, on which it has been established that there must be a solidarity quota, but with the limit of the ordinality criterion. In this Monday's Bilateral Commission, the Spanish government will adopt the bases of the ERC-PSC agreement, which until now had the endorsement of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), but not its signature, nor was it included in any official document.

This Sunday, we're dedicating our dossier to the new financing model that will be discussed on Monday at the Bilateral Commission between the Catalan and Spanish governments in Barcelona. At the meeting, steps should be taken toward a more transparent system that would give Catalonia the ability to collect personal income tax and other state taxes, a system that could be extended to the rest of the autonomous regions under the common system.

As they already told you would happen yesterday, the Constitutional Court ruled that the amnesty law was in accordance with the Constitution.

The PP Finance Ministers have put on a lamentable show this Wednesday at the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council: they have stood up from their chairs and have refused to participate in the debate and vote on an initiative, the partial forgiveness of debt, which benefits all the autonomous communities. The reason is not the measure itself, but rather that it is a proposal included in the investiture pact of Pedro Sánchez signed between ERC and PSOE. The message they launched after leaving the room was that they do not want to pick up "the springs of Sánchez's pact with the independentists", thus returning to the old anti-Catalan rhetoric of the PP. On this point it is necessary to make some considerations.

The Ministry of Finance has sent the autonomous communities a report drawn up by its own experts on what should be the adjusted population calculation with a view to an eventual reform of the regional funding system. The way in which the population is calculated is the key to the whole system, as it determines how much money is received. The system does not allocate money according to the number of people living in each region, but rather it adjusts this figure with other variables such as age or geographic dispersion, which is considered to make services more expensive. This fact is detrimental to communities, such as Catalonia, which who population is neither particularly dispersed nor old. That is why the Generalitat has argued for the inclusion of other parameters, such as the cost of living, which introduce a distortion in regional funding.