Arrecife, the Canary city with the lowest taxes

The Madrid municipalities of Boadilla del Monte, Majadahonda and Las Rozas, and in fourth place Arrecife, are the ones that present the best aggregate fiscal competitiveness, if the 141 Spanish municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants are analyzed, while in the opposite pole are Reus (Tarragona), Girona and Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz). The data comes from a report from the Institute of Economic Studies, a think tank that includes numerous businessmen from the country.

Likewise, Madrid, Zaragoza and Málaga are, among the Spanish cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants, those with the least burdensome municipal taxes, while Barcelona, Valencia and Seville are those with a higher tax pressure.

These are some of the data contained in the Opinion Report of the Institute of Economic Studies (IEE) on "The fiscal competitiveness of local entities and autonomous communities. A determining factor for their economic performance", presented this Thursday.

As the report states and has highlighted the president of the IEE, Íñigo Fernández de Mesa, the municipalities collect around 25,000 million euros through their different tax figures, which represents 43% of their income, and two thirds of that amount come from the IBI.

In this tax, the municipalities with the lowest rates are Boadilla del Monte and Santander, compared to Reus and Girona, which almost doubled the national average rate.

In any case, on average, the six municipalities with more than half a million inhabitants are the ones that best treat their citizens fiscally with the IBI and those with 500,000 and 200,000 inhabitants are the most burdensome.

Grouping the municipalities by communities and calculating the weighted average of all taxes, Baleares is the autonomous community that presents the best local fiscal competitiveness, followed by Madrid, Cantabria and Asturias, all of them above the national average.

The report also includes a comparison of personal tax imposition in large European cities, which, examining equal incomes in equal family units, places Madrid and Barcelona - in that order - in a middle range, with worse fiscal competitiveness than Paris, Berlin and London but better than Rome, Lisbon and Amsterdam.

As for the autonomous communities, which collect more than 110,000 million annually (in 2022 figures), approximately 33.5% of their total resources, the most competitive tax system, according to the indicators prepared by the IEE, is that of Madrid, ahead of the three Basque territories - Vizcaya, Álava and Guipúzcoa, in that order - and the Canary Islands.

In contrast, the worst results are obtained in Catalonia, the Valencian Community, Aragon, Asturias and Extremadura.

The IEE analysis concludes that "a competitive fiscal framework favors greater economic growth and contributes to a better standard of living", since the communities with less tax pressure also have a higher GDP per capita, so that "regional competitiveness is postulated as a key factor in the economic development of the regions".

It also highlights that in 2022 the community with the best results in terms of regional competitiveness is Madrid, followed by the Basque Country and Catalonia, which are also the only ones that exceed the European average within the Spanish territory.

In contrast, the Spanish regions with the worst results in this classification are Extremadura, Andalusia and the Canary Islands, far from the European average.