Las prioridades sociales de gasto en obra social de las cajas de ahorro: estimación a partir de la aplicación de un “juego presupuestario”

How would you allocate an additional amount of 100 million among different welfare projects (WP)? Basically, this is the question that by means of a personal survey structured as a budget game has been asked to a sample of 519 people around all the Spanish territory in order to infer their expenditure priorities. The Welfare Projects (in Spanish, “Obra Social”) is the main distinctive feature of the Spanish savings banks with respect to the rest of financial entities. That is why, it is so important analyzing to what extent the expenditure carried out by those entities in WP matches social preferences. First of all, from the results of the survey we infer a very intense demand for all those expenditure categories within the area so-called “social and health assistance”, followed by those related with “research and education”. Regarding this, by means of a simple econometric analysis, we have been able to show that the savings banks have internalized that social demand and so adjust their expenditure policy at the same speed that the citizenship demands. Second, the database obtained from the survey has permitted us carrying out a regression analysis in order to determine the patterns of social demand with respect to the WP. The results of the analysis show that variables like being customer of a savings bank, age, education level, income or the geographical area of residence have a significant impact on the socialpreferences expressed by the surveyed population.