Public Expenditure, Rights and Earmarkings: Towards Good Governance and Good Administration?
Rights, public expenditure and earmarkings. Here I will proceed to make some considerations on the question of the relationship between rights and public spending, which is provided for annually in public budgets. This is a field that has received little academic work and few judicial decisions in Spain. However, as highlighted by Holmes and Sunstein in a book on this subject, all rights can involve a cost (the right to vote and to stand for election and electoral expenses, the right to property and expenses for the corresponding registers and their security…). However, it is also true that there are ways of satisfying rights (including social rights) that do not involve public expenditure, such as, for example, good regulation, delimiting other rights on the basis of their social function or imposing public service and universal service obligations, in the case of services of general economic interest, to guarantee general interests and constitutional rights. The traditional and current situation in Spain and other countries (conceptual and legal separation between rights and public spending) has been considered a serious problem, which can make a right a dead letter in reality. A fine analyst of the issue and critic of this historical separation […]