The vice-president and chief of Economy and Treasury Department of the Government of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, has communicated that “we must transform the economic and productive system by boosting future strategic sectors to improve citizens’ life”, during the presentation of the ‘C report, which has been elaborated by the Catalan Job, Economy and Social Department.

Vice-president Aragonès has referred to the investment policy that should be carried out to come out of the current economic crisis, a goal to where the Next Generation European funds are going to be assigned, what means “a unique opportunity to build a fairer, more prosperous, greener, more feminist and totally free future”.

In this sense, Aragonès has alerted that the European resources can’t be assigned to the normal expenses, but to invest in the modernization of the public services and the transformation of the productive model “making it more resilient, more adapted to the big challenges that the pandemics have accelerated, like the growing inequality in society, digitalization, robotization, changes in the way of producing, commercializing and distributing, as well as in the climate transition”.

Vice-president Aragonès, who has participated remotely in the report presentation event, has explained that the Catalan Government has been working in the definition of the four main pillars where to direct the economic and productive transformation through the projects that opt to the Next Generation funds: economy for life, digitalization process, energetic transition, and society of knowledge.

Aragonès has insisted that the current situation of a Government on duty limits the behaviour capacity and “we need to start a Catalan Government resulting from the 14th of February elections to being able to face future challenges”. Also, to “demand to the Government of Spain the maximum of possible European funds to arrive to Catalonia and to have the capacity to assign the resources where they truly have more transforming capacity and continue to accompany them with a new budget, as the necessary expansive economic policy requires in a recession context like the one we are experiencing today”, have added the vice-president Aragonès.

From her side, the Secretary of Economy, Natàlia Mas, has emphasized that investment is one of the decisive factors for economic growth and it’s a capital tool to face the climatic challenge. Mas has repeated that investments will have a long-term effect, for which it is not only important the mobilization of these European resources, but also a good planification of investment projects.

In the report, the Catalan Job, Economy and Social Department identifies public investments that, according to their experts, would be more profitable in the economic and social fields in Catalonia and would allow to revert low productivity as well as to create quality occupation in the current post-covid context. She defends in her conclusions that, with the correct election of the investment type, economy would be more resilient in view of possible changes in the economic cycle and would coincide with north-EU countries.

From the Chief Office, as the consultant body for the Catalan Government, they insist in the unique opportunity that the Next Generation European funds and the Long-term Finance Framework of the European Union for the period 2021-2027 constituted, and difficult to repeat in the temporal horizon of the next decades, to face the crisis generated by the Covid-19 and to re-build the productive system, which must be more ecologic, digital, and resilient.

The complete session can be seen following this link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6HCfO5