The Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) today presented the studies of the first phase of the 2022-2026 Spending Review, in which it evaluates the civil servant mutual insurance system and financial instruments to support SMEs. This Spending Review cycle, approved by the Council of Ministers in December 2021, follows on from the first exercise carried out by AIReF. After this first phase, AIReF will analyse benefits such as Temporary Disability, Official Development Assistance, and the Minimum Income Scheme (MIS) in the second phase, and employment policies and the 2014-2020 multi-year financial framework in the third phase.
During the presentation of the studies, the President of AIReF, Cristina Herrero, highlighted the evaluation function that AIReF performs and considered that it is time to move forward and guarantee its consolidation through a reform of the Organic Law of the institution that provides evaluation with the same legal guarantees as supervision, giving AIReF a greater role in determining the policies to be evaluated, improving planning, guaranteeing access to information by the institution and improving the system for monitoring evaluations.
In the first study, AIReF conducted an exhaustive evaluation of the Spanish mutual insurance system, based on the analysis of more than 400 million anonymised microdata and a survey of mutual insurance companies. This evaluation, which combines administrative information, hospital activity, pharmaceutical consumption, and healthcare activity, provides empirical evidence on the efficiency, effectiveness, and equity of the current system.
In the second study, AIReF evaluates two types of financial instruments enhanced by the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (RTRP): the public counter-guarantee system provided by CERSA within the Spanish guarantee system and official financial support for venture capital.
All information related to the two studies is available on the AIReF website, including the complete studies, executive summaries, press releases, infographics, presentations, an Excel file for downloading data, and interactive graphs for each publication.
