The relationship between the revenue and the fiscal capacity of the spanish autonomous regions

Abstract

The tax basket derived from the financial model of the Autonomous Regions (AR) provides 63.4% of their total revenue for the common-regime AR, and 98.3% for the foral Autonomous Regions (of regional law of the “fueros”). These percentages show that a significant part of the resources of the regional governments, especially those of the foral territories, comes from taxes paid by their citizens and that, therefore, an important part of their resources is directly related to their tax capacity. The starting hypothesis is that a government with a higher tax capacity ends up having more tax resources than a government with a lower capacity. The aim of this paper is, precisely, to check to what extent this relationship is fulfilled and in how far the remaining sources of the model (in the case of the common-regime ARs, the Fund for the Guarantee of Fundamental Public Services and the three adjustment funds) and the combination of transfers that they end up receiving outside the circuit of their own model, which determine the resources that the regional governments end up having at their disposal, are or are not related to their own fiscal capacity.