A comparative study on Spanish regions’ investment capacity in a budgetary discipline anticipated scenario, by means of multicriteria Promethee method

The principle of the budgetary discipline, compulsory for the Spanish regions by the Law 18/2001, December 12th [General Law of Budgetary Stability] and the Organic Law 5/2001, December 13th, complementary to the former one, established in the frame of the European Agreement for Stability and Growth, can generate conflicting situations with those Spanish regions which investment capacity depends on external borrowing. This paper deals with the corresponding relative position of the different regions, according to its investment capacity, using for that purpose a simulation exercise, in which we advance the budgetary stability constraint for the period 1997-2000. In this paper, the public financial activity is treated, for each region, through different public revenue and expenditure ratios per capita. This situation leads to consider a multicriteria Promethee method as the apropriate one to obtain a global ranking for all of them. In the opinion of Al-Shemmeri, Al-Kloub and Rearman (1997), this method is the most adequate one because of the following advantages: public authorities, as decision takers, can understand easily the results, regardless the knowledge they may have about it; the method uses understandable economic parameters; the method avoids distorting scale effects among different alternatives and, as well, makes possible the deviation evaluation between alternatives and, finally, allows for sensibility analysis.