The reform of the administration has made headway in Catalonia. Or at least that is how it is viewed by the more than 200 entities and business associations that are part of the Forum of Entities for the Reform of the Administration (FERA), an organization established about two years ago to demand reforms in the public sector. The processing of the bill for professional managers in the public sector – a regulation that is part of this process, approved in July by the government of Salvador Illa – overcame the obstacle last Friday in the parliamentary committee, where ERC, Comuns, and the PP presented amendments to the entirety. Junts avoided proposing one, and in this way, the vote next month in Parliament will be reached with the possibility that the regulation will continue its path.

Public administration debt closed the second quarter at an amount equivalent to 101.4% of the gross domestic product (GDP, the indicator that measures the economic activity of a territory), according to data published this Wednesday by the Bank of Spain. The figure is lower than the ratio registered during the first quarter, when the liability represented 103.2% of GDP. In absolute terms, however, the debt rose by 4.3% year-on-year, to 1.763 trillion euros, a new record for the State as a whole.

For almost 15 years, we have been promoting improvements in the institutional quality of our public administrations with the aim of achieving greater engagement with citizens and, therefore, greater social legitimacy. This involves a set of organizational reforms such as transparency, accountability, open government, integrity and the fight against corruption, and internal systems of complianceetc. All of this was deployed judiciously, since these elements of institutional quality represented the perennial challenge for national administrations compared to those of the most advanced and mature democratic countries. Moving from rhetoric to practice has not been easy, and administrations have had to invest an extraordinary amount of resources to implement these strategies. The result of all this has generated two paradoxes. The first: surprisingly, ordinary citizens have greeted all these changes with complete indifference. The second: the organizational efforts to meet these new demands have been detrimental to the quality of public services, and currently, the social legitimacy of public administrations is surely at its lowest point in the last four decades. In short: we have promoted instruments to enjoy greater social support, and the result has been just the opposite. We offer some reflections on what has happened in recent years:

The public sector is once again paying later than the private sector. Specifically, in 2024, public administrations paid on average after 67 days. This not only means having increased the payment period to companies by twelve days compared to 2023, but also exceeding the payment period of the private sector by three days, as reported this Thursday by the Multisectorial Platform against Late Payments (PMcM) led by the president of Pimec, Antoni Cañete, through a new report on the situation of late payments. This situation, in which the public sector pays later than the private sector, has not occurred since 2014, when the State was still in the midst of the Great Recession.