The economic vice president, Nadia Calviño, is asking the communities to speed up the implementation of the aid
Despite defending for months the “cruising speed” at which European funds are being implemented, the government yesterday expressed its concern about the bottleneck that this aid will suffer once it reaches the autonomous communities.
The economic vice-president, Nadia Calviño, presided over a new meeting of the Sectoral Conference in which the deployment of this money and the proposals of the autonomous governments to finalize the addendum to the recovery plan that the executive branch in the first quarter. “The meeting was held with a very positive and constructive tone and almost all communities expressed their gratitude and recognition for the efforts made for the rapid deployment of the funds throughout the territory,” they stressed from the Ministry of Economy.
However, concerns about implementation data became apparent when the ministry requested autonomy “to identify those projects that may have more difficulty in implementation so that resources can be reallocated.” That is, if necessary, some of them will be discarded to give priority to others.
The figures used by Economie about the use of aid in the field speak for themselves. According to Ministry data, the Autonomous Communities have already called for 50% of the European funds transferred so far through 130 sectoral conferences. That is about 20,600 million euros. But only about 4,000 million have been solved, less than 20% of that total. Faced with this data, the General State Administration claims to have solved more than 80% of its calls, which corresponds to an investment of about 19,200 million euros.
Against this background, Calviño acknowledged the regional governments’ management efforts, but called for additional acceleration in the coming months. All this in a context in which Spain will receive on 20 February the delegation from Brussels that will examine the state of reforms and the investments made.
According to the government’s calculations, the implementation of the Recovery Plan (together with the addendum) will allow the level of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to increase by an average of 3 points per year until 2031.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
