The Spanish government leads in receiving the grant part of European funds, having already completed three payments from Brussels worth €37 billion, but it is the twelfth in terms of execution capacity. Over the two-year period 2021 and 2022, Spain has barely executed 10.4 % of the €70 billion it has pre-allocated, which places it in twelfth place in the European Union.
The European Commission has published the Staff Working Document in the framework of the assessment of the Stability and Growth Programmes presented last April 2023 by all Member States. According to this information, Spain would have made a final expenditure under the RRM equivalent to 0.2% of GDP in 2021 and 0.4% in 2022.
This would amount to a total finalist expenditure of around 0.6% of GDP, i.e. slightly more than 7.2 billion, 10.4% of the total funds pre-allocated in 2021 and 19.4% of the funds effectively released by the European Commission to Spain since the approval of the Plan.
Thus, according to the content of this report, although Spain is the fourth EU country that has spent the most as a percentage of its GDP since the approval of the Mechanism, it is one of the countries that has absorbed the least percentage of pre-allocated funds, 10.4%, compared to more than 50% of the pre-allocated funds absorbed by France, close to 50% by Sweden, 40% by Germany and 25% by Austria. Italy, with a pre-allocation of transfers similar to Spain’s, according to data published by the Commission, would have doubled the degree of execution, exceeding 20% of pre-allocated funds.
