Available data on-budget and off-budget activities of Spanish central, state and local governments

In this paper we present an analysis of the informative content of available public sector data for Central, State (Regional) and Local Governments in Spain. We first review the framework that defines budgetary arrangements in place in Spain, with a special emphasis on the decentralization process. We then present official budgetary projections for the balance of the different levels of Government and compare them with both outturn and national accounts data. We assess the magnitude of the differences between budgetary and national accounts balance data and between the latter and a balance obtained with currently available data on a broad definition of public sector activity. We attempt to establish some regularities in the relations among the different accounting variables.