David Tuesta on budget spending in the provinces: "The money is there, the problem is poor execution"

It is true that much remains to be done to close the development gaps, health and education at the national level. The great excuse for years has been the lack of resources. However, Peru21 has shown that this situation is not entirely true. David Tuestaformer Minister of Economy, analyzes the problem.

Perú21 warned that many municipalities have not disbursed a single sol from their budget. What is happening?

One could understand that the authorities are just sitting down and usually the execution is low, but when one makes a comparison with other years we see that what happens this month is that the execution has been even lower and they have large-scale resources . There is a very bad decentralization process and a bad choice of authorities that in the end have gotten used to not doing works.

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Many authorities joined these protests, stating that the system does not work, arguing for a change in the Constitution.

The population has to know that they have money, the issue is poor execution. An example is the case of Arequipa, in Yarabamba, there are more than 300 million soles a year, some surely think that Lima has much more, this is false. Miraflores has 73 million. So, let’s compare 73 million from Miraflores with 300 million from Yarabamba. If we now incorporate another important variable, which is the amount of population, I divide it by the population and it turns out that Yarabamba per inhabitant has a budget of 82 thousand soles. Miraflores costs 453 soles per inhabitant. I put the reference simply so that it can be seen that there is financial potential, but there is simply terrible and bad management.

Why does inflation affect the provinces more than Lima?

One is the issue of conflict. During Castillo’s government, the number of conflicts increased by more than 10% compared to the average prior to his government, and to a large extent, officially encouraged by the speeches of ministers. Two, a decentralization process was carried out where the regions were given the right to exercise their resources, but there was no training process for the authorities that were going to make use of these. So if you give money and there is no management, there is no way they can execute well. What’s more, those who can execute end up in jail, for corruption, precisely because the temptation is great and the level of management is low. Therefore; Blaming Lima is false, the resources are there, you just have to know how to manage.