Estabilidad presupuestaria y deuda pública: Su aplicación a las Comunidades Autónomas

This paper aims to analyse the constitutional and legal limits which have been established with regards to budgetary stability and financial sustainability and their possible application to the Spanish autonomous communities. The starting point is the allocation of financial autonomy that is enshrined in Article 156 (Spanish Constitution), but we also examine aspects of other provisions that may demarcate this financial autonomy in some way. In particular,Article 135 (Spanish Constitution), which in its amendment put asevere limitation on public spending, articulated through the concept of a permitted public deficit, and which also put in place the mechanisms to achieve this. What is referred to here are public spending rules, debt ceilings, and the limitation of using debt as a source of financing government spending. Thus, by quantitative spending control, there is a direct impact on one of the public resources provided for in Article 157 (Spanish Constitution), inwhich there is only one constitutional provision which had a direct impact: Article 157.3. In our paper we study Law 2/2012 on budgetary stability and financial sustainability whose purpose is implicit in its title; under Article 135 (Spanish Constitution), this is the rule applicable in this matter, in particular regarding the debt of the autonomous communities.