EFE
Nine autonomous communities reduced their debt in the period 2000-2004, especially the Basque Country, Galicia and Andalusia, and also the Canary Islands, by 0.1 percent of their GDP, according to the latest bulletin from the Bank of Spain. The study, which analyzes the evolution of debt by Autonomous Community, indicates that, as a whole, the autonomous regions reduced their debt by 0.1 percent of their GDP between 2000 and 2004. The community that reduced its debt the most was the Basque Country, since in 2000 it was 5.2 percent of its GDP and in 2004 it was 2.6, so the reduction is 2.6, followed by Galicia, which reduced it by 1.7 in this period, and Andalusia with 1.8. Navarra also reduced its debt by 1.5, Catalonia by 0.8, Aragon by 0.4, Extremadura by 0.3 and the Canary Islands by 0.1. On the contrary, Madrid, the Valencian Community, the Balearic Islands and Castilla-La Mancha significantly increased their debt. Thus, Madrid, which had a debt in 2000 of 3.9 percent of its GDP, grew to 6.2 in 2004, so it increased by 2.3, while in the Valencian Community this percentage increased by 1.7 percent, in the Balearic Islands by 1.3 and in Castilla-La Mancha by one.
The Bulletin recalls the changes introduced in the autonomous financing system in recent years that "have significantly altered the composition of the sources of obtaining resources of the administrations".
It specifies that both the financing agreement for the period 1997-2001 and, mainly, the one that came into force in 2002, increased the fiscal co-responsibility of the autonomous regions by increasing the set of transferred taxes and expanding their regulatory capacity in tax matters. Therefore, as a result of these changes, transfers from other public administrations reduced their importance to represent 33.2 percent of their total resources in 2004, compared to 66.4 percent in 2000. The Bank of Spain adds that between 2000 and 2004 there was an increase in the weight of the debt of public companies dependent
of the Autonomous Communities, which reaches 0.4 percent of GDP. Therefore, the evolution of the debt, the report continues, should be weighted taking into account the activity of the public companies of each community, since neither the channeling of the expenditure of the communities towards these public companies, nor the forms chosen for their financing and, therefore, their indebtedness, have followed the same patterns. The bulletin indicates that the autonomous regions maintained in recent years the tendency to increase long-term financing to the detriment of short-term loans. Thus, the latter continue to decrease in relative importance, and went from representing 6.4 of the total debt in 2004 compared to 10.3 at the end of 2000. On the contrary, long-term loans reach a weight of 42.3 of the debt in 2004, compared to 39.5 in 2000 and the rest of the long-term values reach 48.6 in 2004 compared to 47.5 in 2000.
