Luis Ángel Hierro Recio, Pedro Atienza Montero

The stabilization effect of the regional financing in Spain

The aim of this paper is to estimate the stabilizing effect of the regional financing in Spain on the regional business cycles, both as a whole and considering individually each Autonomous Community and distinguishing the effect of taxes and transfers. Furthermore, we distinguish between a scenario considering the actual financing resources from financing models and an alternative considering the standardized financing resources. For the aggregate estimation we implement a Generalized Least Squares estimation to a panel of data for the period 1987-2010. To estimate the individual stabilizing effect in each region, we employ the technique of Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) for the total period. The results show that the stabilizing effect of the total resources for the whole period is 6.9% and 5.1% as we use one or the other scenario and that the effect is asymmetric and wider than at the aggregate level when calculated for each Autonomous Community.

Keywords: Regional financing; stabilizing effect; asymmetric economic cycles

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