Stand and deliver

A couple of years ago, I came across a 1852 map from Torres Villegas splitting Spain in 4 different groupings:

· Uniform or Purely Constitutional Spain which comprises these thirty-four Provinces of the Crowns of Castile and Leon, equal in all economic, judicial, military, and civil branches. Former kingdoms of Castile, León and Granada.

· Incorporated or Assimilated Spain which comprises the eleven provinces of the Crown of Aragon, still different in the manner of contribution and in some points of private law. Crown of Aragon

· "Spain of the Fueros", or approximately "Statutory Spain".Kingdom of Navarre (actual Basque country was part of Kingdom of Navarre)

· Colonial Spain

I saved the picture in my “pictures to be used file”. I was convinced that if one day, the inter-regional fiscal balances were published, mapping the net balances to the map would be very revealing. And you can now check the result by yourself. The incorporated Spain has a revenue outflow of 23,100 billion Euro, the Statutory Spain is basically neutral and all the Uniform Spain gets a subsidy of 12,500 million Euro, not taking into consideration the additional inflow from the European Union. I think that voluntary solidarity is a good thing, but this is a ROBBERY, and if at least, there were any signs of thankfulness, if when we travel to the rest of Spain people would come and hug or kiss us, I would maybe feel that it is worth the while, even if this unconditional transfer is perpetuating some habits that will make the situation permanent, but the reality is that, when traveling in Spain, we get insulted (called polacos or catalufos) and our cars get vandalized, our products get boycotted and our language treated with no respect.

In the meantime, Catalonia's infrastructure is crumpling, the Mediterranean corridor high speed train is still years from completion (but you can go take it now to go from Valladolid to Bollullos del Condado), we need to pay toll in most of the highways, we still continue to pay inheritance tax and even worse, the Barcelona industrial belt, which requires heavy investment in infrastructures, education, healthcare and neighborhood amenity upgrades, is totally underfunded, unable to absorb the old and the new immigration and turning into a potential social disaster. In addition to that one Extremaduran Euro is only worth 62 cents in Barcelona due to the cost of living differential and let’s not forget that in Extremadura 25% of the workforce are public servants, versus only 8% in Catalonia (too many in my opinion).

The result would be even more skewed if we corrected Madrid's capitality effect (if Madrid were not the capital, it would have the same economy as Guadalajara). Despite the fact that Madrid is a net contributor, mainly because of its status of capital of Spain, it cannot offset the huge deficit that its surrounding provinces generate.

Finally, the analysis of the inter-regional fiscal balances shows that the idea of the Catalan Countries, that I like to call Valeària to avoid unnecessary sensitivities, makes a lot of sense, not only from the linguistic or cultural side, but also from the economical point of view.

Note: I have taken one of the methodologies proposed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy. All the methods yield to the same conclusion, although this methodology is one of the most extreme ones. Click here to see the full report.