Paula Gomes dos Santos, Carla Martinho
The objective of this work is to analyze if the data of Spain and Portugal, under the reporting mechanisms of the Directive 2011/7/EU, is comparable, allowing to foresee financial problems. One of the great challenges of public governance is taking measures to ensure financial sustainability.
This study highlights the need to obtain comparable, reliable, and timely information in the European Union, urging for a common methodology between the member states.
Financial sustainability is the ability to finance all commitments, ensuring intergenerational equity (CICA, 2009; European Committee [EC], 2011; IFAC, 2013; IPSASB, 2013). According to the EC (2019), solvency problems (ability to meet medium and long-term financial obligations), and liquidity (ability to meet short-term financial obligations), are interrelated and are equally important to ensure the governments' sustainability.
Given the last financial international crisis, several international entities have recommended governments to take actions to ensure financial sustainability, which is one of the major current challenges of public governance (European Parliament [EP], 2009; EC, 2011; International Monetary Fund [IMF], 2014).
It has been pointed out that excessive debt is a risk factor for the governments' financial health and intergenerational equity (Cabaleiro, Buch & Vaamonde, 2013). This reinforces the need to provide comparable, reliable, and timely information, which allows anticipating possible financial problems (Cohen & Karatzimas, 2015; Oulasvirta, 2014; Christiaens, Reyniers & Rollé, 2010).
To develop sustainability policies of short-term public debt, the European Parliament, and the Council of the European Union (EU) have published the Directive 2011/7/EU. Aiming to reduce the late payments culture in Europe (EP, 2009), it set a 30-day deadline for commercial transactions payments. However, it has not established the methodology or the frequency to measure the average payment period (APP). This has already been identified by the EP (2018), pointing that there is no common indicator for the reporting mechanisms concerning the payment behavior of European public authorities and that the absence of such a harmonized measurement limits the up-to-date statistical data, and it does not allow cross-country comparison.
This methodology absence may also be a problem for the research carried out in the context of the public entity’s financial sustainability. For example, Alaminos, Fernández, García, and Fernández (2018) proposed a model for assessing municipal financial distress with a new proxy of financial situation - the ratio of default to municipal commercial debt, based on Spanish Organic Law 2/2012, 27th April, which states that public entities are considered in a good financial situation if the average period for paying debts is less than 30 days.
Let us compare the APP of the Spanish Local Entities and the Portuguese Local Governments. Spanish data is reported by Ministerio de Hacienda Y Función Pública (being available monthly, from September 2014 to May 2021), and in Portugal is reported by Direção-Geral das Autarquias Locais (being available quarterly from 2008 to the last quarter of 2019). Given the difference in the periods in which the information is available (highlighting the lack of reports about the last year and a half in Portugal), it was decided to present the APP for December of each year, from 2014 to 2019. In Figure 1, we can see the APP of the Spanish Local Entities.