Spain will receive between 4,000 and 6,000 million additional euros in European funds, above the 70,000 million initially assigned to the account of the program ‘Next Generation EU‘.
As the economic vice president has been explaining, Nadia Calvinoat the end of June the European Commission will recalculate the amount allocations to each countryafter taking into account the real evolution of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2020 and 2021. The worse relative evolution of the Spanish GDP, whose post-covid recovery is slower than that of the main European partners, will make Spain the creditor of a greater volume of aid. According to the estimates of the director of the consulting firm LLYC for the Unit of Next Generation EU Projects, Dove Baena, in a document published this Thursday, the recalculation will send Spain between 4,000 and 6,000 million additional euros. According to sources familiar with the European procedure for recalculating Next Generation EU funds, this range of amounts is in line with the official figure that will be made public in the near future.
Addendum to the Recovery Plan
This same Thursday, the economic adviser of the representation of the European Commission in SpainMaría Canal Fontcuberta, explained to Efe that in order to make use of the largest subsidy (the amount of which has not been specified), Spain will have to review its Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR) “and add new investments that justify a need higher funding”.
In fact, Vice President Calviño has already explained that the Government is working on an addendum to the PRTR to mobilize additional transfers, as well as the section of credits assigned to Spain, whose use was not foreseen in the initial Recovery Plan, which was limited to the application of the section of 70,000 million in subsidies. In principle, the EC assigned another 70,000 million in soft loans to Spain, which are what the Government intends to request now. This amount could be increased by at least another 10,000 million as a result, also, of the recalculation derived from the final GDP data. The expert Paloma Baena puts this additional amount at a maximum of 16,000 million. The addendum to the PRTR must detail the projects in which these will be applied. european credits (which, unlike subsidies, will have to be repaid), as well as an extended list of reforms and investments that the Government of Spain must comply with as a condition for access to these soft loans.
‘Repower USA’
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In addition to addressing Spain’s increased participation in the ‘Next Generation EU’ European funds (up to an additional 6,000 million in subsidies and more than 10,000 added in credits), the addendum to the Recovery Plan could also be used by the Government to add a new chapter dedicated exclusively to the implementation of the new funds linked to the ‘Repower EU’, which is the strategy proposed by the European Commission to tackle the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine and the dependence on Russian fossil fuels. In the case of Spain, it is estimated that it will be able to access up to 4,000 million euros in Repower EU subsidies if the European income from emission rights is distributed among the Member States under the same criteria as the Next Generation EU funds. This criterion, however, is still under discussion and could change.
The ‘Repower EU’ program is committed to three lines of action: energy savingdiversification in gas supply and increase in the proportion of renewable energy on the energy mix. In addition to providing countries with income from emission rights, this program also makes it possible to transfer transfers from other structural funds to these lines of energy action.