The conditional financing is usually identified with the set of resources provided to the Autonomous Communities to be applied to a specific purpose. For the most part, these resources are not included, as far as the Autonomous Communities of the common system are concerned, within the current financing model.
Although there are other resources that can be classified as conditional financing, it is essentially composed of three sets of resources:
- Those that come from the European Union Funds.
- Those that are collected in the Interterritorial Compensation Funds (FCI).
- Those that are channeled either through state subsidies, through collaboration agreements, or through program contracts.
The first group includes the various Community contributions that, either directly or through the General Administration of the State, the Autonomous Communities receive for the development of the different policies carried out by the European Commission, among which the agricultural policy and the cohesion policy stand out.
As a result of the provisions of Article 158 EC, a national regional policy has been developed in Spain, closely linked to the definitions and objectives of the cohesion policy of Community origin. The main instrument of regional policy at the state level in Spain, together with the System of Regional Incentives, is given by the Interterritorial Compensation Funds, concretion of the principle of interregional solidarity.
Finally, it highlights a third group of resources that derive from the different instruments of inter-administrative collaboration existing in our Autonomous State. This group is made up of all the contributions that, under different names, have their ultimate foundation in the principle of collaboration between administrations. This includes the subsidies that the General Administration of the State transfers annually to the Autonomous Communities, as well as the collaboration agreements and program-contracts signed between both administrations.
This is a significant set of resources, both in quantitative terms and in terms of their significance in a decentralised state such as ours, based on collaboration between administrations. These three instruments finance objectives that are shared by both the General Administration of the State and the Autonomous Communities, articulated through agreements made in the Sectoral Conferences or in the clauses contained in the conventions or programme-contracts.
They cover a very wide range of purposes, ranging from actions of an economic nature - through the provision of public capital - to actions of social protection and promotion, through the production of public goods of a preferential nature such as health, education or culture.
