Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
Thanks for giving the deeper picture! But I have one quibble:

The second one makes more sense. It is about the resources invested in catalonia on Social Security-Medicair and on infraestructures.

You convinced me on the first, but I think infrastructures is at least a more complex issue. Per capita GDP (or average earnings) doesn't express the as-is level of the infrastructure - and even if Catalonia has regions as poor or poorer as Extramadura, it has a better transport network or (I'm guessing) canalisation.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Mon Jan 9th, 2006 at 07:11:26 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Dead on. Infraestructure is more complex.
Investement in infraestructure in Catalonia is smaller than the ratio of population. And not all infraestructures are social infraestrucuture.

Can you imagine the mess in the number on how to count roads, airports and so on and on and on? In theory , this should be ivnested mainly by the central government now... so who would take care  from now on? A part will help poor areas but most of it it is linked to the comparison wiht the level of infraestructures on airports, public transport and roads in the other big center: Madrid. How much money in the future and compared with what others areas of Spain?

So, yes you are right, the topic of infraestructure is such a mess that I doubt I/they can convince anybody. Even people working on it do not have the things clear (every six months the catalan govermnemnt asks the central governemnt to perform and release a study on the subject so to have some numbers....no way to get it). In any case the governemnt in catalonia should have a level of investment according to population (3 points less than the GDP) in infraestructure, I do not care where it comes from.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

by kcurie on Mon Jan 9th, 2006 at 10:31:56 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I was possibly not clear on this the first time: I think the existing infrastructure of Catalonia is more developed than that of other regions, thus it deserves less investment than those other regions, per capita. With your additions to just how complex the infrastructure issue is, I suggest on some fields this could be managed: say, there is reliable statistics on social infrastructure like canalisation, you could make investment in that field an inverse function of the ratio of already canalised homes. (Do you know anything about how social infrastructure spending, as opposed to transport stuff, is divided up now?)

On the other hand, say, metro stations or bus routes into poor suburbs could be financed in a population+income-based way that ends up giving more to Madrid and Barcelona than other areas.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Mon Jan 9th, 2006 at 11:43:34 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Display:

Occasional Series