2023-09-24 20:19:47
The public sector has been confirmed as the largest “company” in Spain. And it has been so for more than two decades, when back in 2009, with the controls of the Government in the hands of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the volume of citizens who obtain some type of direct remuneration from the Public Administrations clearly exceeds to the number of employees integrated into the private sector. Therefore, the payroll that the State must face increases every year and does so at the same cruising speed as recessions, inflation and the cost of living. Subsidies, unemployment benefits, pensions, salaries of civil servants, recipients of the minimum vital income… The list seems endless and its proportion has skyrocketed with the last three crises – the Great Recession, the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine –, which has added more weight to the bill in public accounts, which already faces the highest amount in history.
Right now, 19.3 million Spaniards depend directly on what they receive from the State, regional governments and city councils, while those who do so from the private sector barely exceed 14.3 million, a gap of 5 million people. That is, each worker in the private sector must support 1.5 people who are protected by the public sector.
A gap that, despite the good accumulated data on the recovery of private employment after the pandemic, has not stopped growing. According to the latest Active Population Survey (EPA) published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE), 20.7 million employed people are counted – in the month of August 185,000 Social Security affiliates were lost – including 14, 3 million employees in the private sector, a gap of more than 6 million members, which are understood as those who are integrated into the public sector and the self-employed. According to the latest data from the State Public Employment Service (SEPE), 1.7 million people receive some type of contributory unemployment benefit, subsidy, insertion income and aid – such as that for temporary agricultural workers or domestic workers.
In addition, the State has 3.5 million public employees on its payroll – including career, interim and temporary officials – according to the EPA, although the Statistical Bulletin of personnel serving Public Administrations only recognizes that it has 2.7 on staff. million, including both the central, regional and local Administration.
To these numbers we should add the households that receive the Minimum Living Income (IMV), which the Ministry of Social Security states has reached 1.8 million people, corresponding to 672,000 households. However, institutions such as Airef or the Bank of Spain doubt these figures and have reduced their impact to only 280,000 homes, although the official ones continue to mark the statistics. There are 600,000 beneficiaries of minimum regional insertion income.
Pensioners
And the final fireworks come from the pension system. According to Social Security, as of August 1, 9.1 million contributory pensioners were registered in the system. The ordinary monthly pension payroll exceeded 12,000 million euros for the first time in July and in August reached the record of 12,039 million. At this rate, at the end of the year the bill to be paid will have far exceeded 144 billion euros. We must add half a million non-contributory pensions, 700,000 passive class pensions for civil servants and almost one and a half million beneficiaries of dependency benefits.
If you look at the wage bill – which corresponds to the salaries and contributions of officials and politicians – that the State must face this year, it will exceed 153,000 million euros, almost 6,300 million more than in 2022, with an increase of 4.2 % compared to the previous year and almost half a point above the 3.8% increase in total public spending for the current year. The cost for pensioners and civil servants will therefore exceed 297,000 million euros.
Comparison with the OECD
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) itself estimates that spending on the salaries of Spanish civil servants exceeds the OECD average by 8.5 points and accounts for 51.7% of Spain’s production spending, a A figure that places our country as the eighth State that spends the most in this regard, with the difference compared to the first in the ranking, the Nordic countries, where the reversal of the services provided is light years away.
To sustain this public framework, the private sector worker has to face an average monthly payment of 1,600 euros to support the pension system, unemployment benefits, subsidies and the salary of civil servants, employees of public companies, temporary interim workers and politicians. Therefore, each private worker is responsible for annual social payments that exceed 19,000 euros. These are calculations by the Institute of Economic Studies (IEE), which points out that this figure could be used to pay “a mortgage for a good apartment for each employee, with the difference that the mortgage lasts for a certain number of years.”
With all this spending, the Government’s accounts do not balance, despite the exponential growth of the public debt accumulated by the Government of Pedro Sánchez, which exceeds 300,000 million since he was president, which has led Spain to be one of the four most indebted countries and with the largest deficit in the EU, with a public hole that has grown by more than 200 million a day since 2019.
#Administration #pays #salary #million #Spaniards #million #private #sector