The projections made by the Government on the pension system have passed the new Airef examthe independent authority that guarantees the fiscal direction of Spain. The controversial second report requested by the Government, after doubts about whether the previous one correctly included the population and economic growth variables, certifies that the spending rule is complied with, although with a key warning: complying with the current parameters does not guarantee the medium-term sustainability of the pension system, one of the pillars of the welfare state.
The Airef evaluation, presented yesterday, includes the improvement in income that the Government calculates largely due to the expected increase in the contributions of the self-employed, a group that historically contributes less than employees to the Social Security coffers. Incorporating these new income, the document estimates the average weight of spending on benefits in the period 2022-2050 at 13% of GDP, two tenths less than the previous analysis.
The main thing, however, remains to be resolved. Airef, now under the direction of Inés Olóndriz, urges the Government to reform these measurements because it considers that respecting the figures does not guarantee that the system is solid. The weakest point that this organization observes is that the official analysis does not incorporate the impact of pensions on the Spanish public debt.
The argument used is that spending on benefits means subtracting resources from other areas or increasing debt. And public debt is one of the variables that Brussels measures to determine the health of public accounts.
For this reason, Airef asks to adapt Spain’s calculation rule to what it considers the European framework, with special attention to debt. And it grants a limited impact to the improvement in income derived from the extraordinary regularization of foreigners that the Government has launched this year. The contributions derived from its incorporation into the system will add up to around 1,000 million euros in the first year, with a decreasing impact from there.
The Executive, which defends having the best data to evaluate the health of the pension system, is wary of catastrophic predictions about its sustainability.
Without doubting the quality of the official figures, the enormous challenges ahead (guaranteeing decent benefits in a context of growth in the retired population) require thinking about ways to make these two realities compatible.
