The Association of Cement Manufacturers of Catalonia, Ciment Català, has expressed its explicit support for the claim made by the Catalan employers’ association Foment del Treball for the planned investment in infrastructure to be carried out, and for the pending investments to be accelerated to recover the deficit in investment suffered by Catalonia. The support of Ciment Català comes after it was made public that the degree of execution of real investments in Catalonia for the year 2021 has been only 35.8%, the lowest figure in the entire Spanish State.
The investment made in 2021 in Catalonia is far from what was initially budgeted, a recurring issue in recent years. The data published by the General Intervention of the State on May 30 indicate that in Catalonia the budget execution of the State and its public sector for the year 2021 has maintained the path of the last decade, characterized by the systematic non-compliance of the initial budgets, and for an effective volume of investment that in no financial year has reached 1,000 million euros. In Catalonia, of the 2,068.1 million initial investment credit approved in 2021, the State has only executed 739.8 million euros, the equivalent of 9% of all the regions, far from 19% of the weight in state GDP.
The directors of the Catalan companies have expressed their concern about this situation of low levels of execution of investments, since Foment’s claim also has the support of the Pimec employers’ association and the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce. In this sense, the president of Ciment Català, Salvador Fernández Capo, considers that it is necessary to demand that pending investments be accelerated because they are “urgent and necessary for the proper functioning of society and the economy”. A Foment study quantifies the accumulated investment deficit in Catalonia at 35,000 million. It is convenient to mention that this deficit not only includes the State administration, but also refers to all the public administrations with powers over the Catalan territory.