Den Unionisten, die jetzt voller Schadenfreude auf Katalonien verweisen, das bald pleite ist und möglicherweise beim Zentralstaat um Finanzhilfe ansuchen muss, sei erklärt: Katalonien ist während der letzten Jahre genau das widerfahren, was unter Monti — im Zeitraffer — jetzt auch Südtirol droht. Das reiche Land, das nie gegen einen gerechten Finanzausgleich war, wurde ausgenommen wie eine Weihnachtsgans und kann sich jetzt, da es ja kein souveräner Staat ist, selbstverständlich »nur« an Madrid wenden.
Hierzu ein erhellender Artikel, der vor wenigen Wochen im Wall Street Journal erschienen war:
Catalans have additional reasons to question the Spanish government’s capacity for change. Of late Mr. Rajoy has been blaming Spain’s regional governments for the country’s deficit overruns, saying that wayward local spending had jeopardized the entire nation’s creditworthiness. Madrid has threatened to intervene in the regional governments’ budgets if they don’t tidy their books on their own.
But according to Andreu Mas-Colell, Catalonia’s economy minister, the real story is a little different. He explains that with the exception of the Basque Country, Spain’s 17 regions enjoy spending autonomy but almost no revenue autonomy. It’s up to the central government to decide how nationwide revenue gets distributed between regions, and there’s no guarantee that what a region’s citizens pay to Madrid is returned euro-for-euro in funding to that region.
That means the central government can make its own budget shortfalls look smaller—and the regional governments’ look bigger—simply by keeping more of the revenue pot to itself.The result? Catalonia is the seat of Spanish industry and one of the most important industrial districts in Europe, lagging only the likes of Italy’s Lombardy and the German Ruhr in productivity. Yet each year since 1986, an average of 9% of Catalonia’s GDP in net terms has left the region to be redistributed or spent by Madrid. In Spain, only the Balearic Islands surrender a larger share of their annual output. Nowhere else in Europe or North America do intra-national transfers of such size occur as a matter of course.
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