The government reforms linked to the Recovery Plan are “disappointing”, of “poor legal quality” and “poorly planned”

2023-06-05 18:49:51

Some “disappointing” reforms, approved with urgent procedures that “have had a negative impact on their quality”, “badly planned” and “empty of content”. This is a devastating report presented by the Fundación de Estudios de Economía Aplicada (Fedea) on the reforms linked to the Recovery Plan whose processing rules point in the “opposite direction to what would be desirable” or fall “short in the deployment of measures necessary”.

The prestigious “think tank” does not leave a puppet with a head in the latest issue of its Bulletin, whose main topic is the analysis of these reforms under the title “Follow-up on the reforms of the Recovery Plan”, signed by Ángel de la Fuente. In it, he warns that in the last two and a half years numerous legal regulations have been approved, which have been hastily processed to try to comply with the scheduled schedule -except in the case of the second part of the pension reform-, what has caused “excessive use of emergency procedures that may have had a negative impact on their quality”.

And De la Fuente points in two directions, corresponding to the “most paradigmatic and worrying” rules, because they have concluded as reforms born unsuccessful and “badly planned”: the reform of pensions and the Housing Law. Regarding the first, he points out that it has had the “opposite effect” of what was expected and has not met one of its main objectives, since “the financial sustainability of the system is not guaranteed” by introducing various provisions that will put “strong upward pressure on spending without accompanying them with adequate compensatory measures.” And he focuses his criticism on the safeguard clause of the Intergenerational Equity Mechanism (MEI), which will force “sooner rather than later to raise social contributions”, for which reason the foreseeable effect of the reform will be “a strong increase in the basic deficit of the pension system during the next decades whose financing will absorb a large part of the State’s tax revenues”, which will leave “little room for other spending and investment priorities”.

In the absence of corrective measures, the pension system deficit would be 4.4 points of GDP during 2022-50 and would reach 6.3 points in 2050Therefore, this gap would absorb almost 40% of the net tax revenue of the State (excluding the participation of the Territorial Administrations), and would exceed 50% in 2050. With these figures, the average expenditure on pensions between now and 2050 it would go above 15% of GDP and incremental income during the same period would not exceed 1%, which would cause the immediate activation of the MEI, demanding an increase in contribution rates of between 3 and 4 points. The adjustment would leave the public pension system with a still very large basic deficit, 3.2% of GDP between 2022 and 2050 and around 5% in 2050.

Refering to Housing Lawpoints out that he has sought to alleviate the problem of shortage of supply in the real estate market, but that the consequence will be the opposite since “it will surely contribute to aggravating the problem” because “reduces the profitability and increases the risk of this activity.”

The study also reviews two other regulations in the pipeline that are good examples of the limitations of a good part of the recent round of reforms: Law of Public Function and the Law of Families. Regarding the norm of civil servants, the text recognizes that has developed “some innovations” already outlined in the Basic Statute of the Public Employeewhich could “help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of public administration” through the “professionalization of its managers and the improvement of the tools available to them” to “encourage good staff performance” and “deploy available resources according to the needs of the service.

However, the standard has not met expectations and has been corrupted at the same rate as the changes introduced to the original text of the draft, by distorting “the role of the new performance evaluations”, which has raised the upper echelons of the Administration up in arms after denouncing that the Government has opened the door to appointments by hand and promotions without merit. Along with this, they also criticize the introduction of “rigid elements that will have effects contrary to those supposedly sought”, such as the requirement to agree in advance with the unions on key issues for the proper functioning of administrations. To this is added

According to the Family Law, Fedea ensures that the balance is “more positive” after introducing a “welcome update of the concept of family to adapt it to the changing social reality” and, in coherence, “extends some aid previously restricted to large families or married couples to new beneficiaries” . But she also sees negative aspects for lengthening “unnecessarily” with “a willful catalog of good intentions that, in many cases, they lack content or are redundant because they are rights already guaranteed in other regulations in force”. In this sense, the text points out that the regulation is limited “in many cases to identifying a series of family situations that are considered deserving of special support and urging the Public Administrations to establish the pertinent measures according to the needs of each type of family”.