Rafael Granell
Amadeo Fuenmayor
Abstract:
In the context of the current System of Autonomous Financing of the Common System Communities (hereinafter SFA), it is essential to know the resources that each autonomous community obtains and also how many resources it could obtain if it were to exploit its capacity to the maximum.
In order to be able to analyse the evolution of these magnitudes over time and compare regions with each other, it is necessary to know the concept of fiscal effort, which we will define in the second section of this paper together with those of fiscal capacity and the fiscal gap. The third section deals with the existing methods for estimating the fiscal effort. We start with the first indicators based on economic macro-magnitudes such as national or regional income and review the other three types of indicators that have been used so far: the representative income system, relative tax effort indices and econometric techniques. The fourth section explains how the normative revenue is calculated in the current SFA. Unfortunately, the criteria used to calculate this normative revenue have become outdated over time, so that the indicators obtained no longer relate to the real effort made. To solve this problem, the fifth section reviews the different alternatives that have been put forward in Spain to improve the calculation of tax capacity or to directly estimate the regional tax effort.
Reference:
Granell, R.; Fuenmayor, A. (2020): Esfuerzo fiscal y el sistema de financiación autonómica. En Martínez-Vázquez, J. y Lago, S. (Coord.), Desafios pendientes de la descentralización en España: suficiencia y autonomía tributaria (pp. 161-189), Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, Madrid.