According to the newspaper El Economista, the more than 14 months that have passed since the government approved its Recovery Plan, backed by European Next Generation aid, is now sufficient time to make an initial assessment of the management of the aid.
There is an absence of official statistics on the funds that reached their final recipients. However, a comparison of EU statistics and the most recent statistics from the General State Comptroller’s Office indicate that, so far, the volume of funds actually executed is around 6.9 billion euros between 2021 (2.4 billion) and the first seven months of this year (a further 4.5 billion).
This is a remarkably meagre figure considering the expectations that the government had created through its own budget. Specifically, the government made a provision of 26 billion euros last year against resources from Brussels. And it even received an advance of 9 billion euros in the summer of that year from the European executive.
However, in 2021, not even this advance was fully put into circulation according to the figures handled by the EU auditors. After last year’s accounts were closed, these professionals assured that Spain allocated (which implies going much further than mere authorisation or recognition of obligations) a total of 2.4 billion euros in 2021.
The question now is whether an improvement is taking place in 2022. For this, given that it is too early to have an up-to-date European audit, we need to turn to the figures of the Intervención General del Estado closed as of 31 July, which provide some approximation. And these figures show how far there is still to go.
In this accumulated total, just under 4.5 billion euros are recognised by the statistics as “payments made”, when 28.5 billion are budgeted. And it should be noted that the release of these disbursements does not imply that they are all in the hands of their final recipients, beyond the public sector. A large part of them went to institutions such as the railway infrastructure manager Adif or the Public Employment Services, as well as to the autonomous communities.
