The execution of the European funds associated with the Recovery Plan has not reached the cruising speed promised by the Government’s vice president for economic affairs, Nadia Calviño. The budget execution data released this Wednesday by the Ministry of Finance reveal that at the end of April and therefore closed the first third of the budget year, the Government has barely been able to effectively apply 2,468 million euros of the more than 28,000 million linked to the items of the European Recovery and Resilience Mechanism, that is, just 8.8% of the total.
And the figure would be even worse if the analysis were limited only to the planned investments. The State Administration has only been able to allocate 57 million euros of the nearly 1,600 million that are expected to be spent for the year as a whole, less than 4%.
Once again, the photo is improved by the transfers, that is, by the resources that the State transfers to autonomous bodies, public companies or territorial administrations so that they can carry out the projects with European funds assigned to them. But these transfers are nothing more than a movement of capital and do not imply the arrival of these funds to the real economy, the great deficit that is being perceived in the execution of European funds.
The outlook at the end of April is as follows. The Government has already increased the items linked to the Recovery Plan by 1,125 million compared to the initial amount that appeared in the 2022 Budgets. This is so because last year money was left unallocated and the Government had to change the law so as not to losing those resources and allowing them to be carried over to the year 2022. The 2022 Budgets had allocated 26.9 billion to the investments associated with the Recovery Plan, today they are more than 28 billion.
Of this total amount, at the end of April the Government has authorized the use of 9,500 million euros, a third of the total amount. However, of those 9,500 million released by the Treasury so that the ministries can use them, they have only been able to activate -either by bidding for a contract, opening a call or proposing a contest- 5,890 million euros. Of these, only 2,468 million euros have been effectively assigned to the contractor or supplier, which constitutes the most solid reference to measure the execution of European funds.
However, reaching what is said to reach the real economy has reached 1,587 million euros, according to the account of payments made by the General State Intervention. That is the effective expenditure of European funds that the Government has made in the first four months of the year. There are eight months of 2022 left and no less than 26,500 million euros to spend.
