What to Reform in the European Budget? Some Reflections on the Stakes of the Current Budget Review Process
The EU budget is the financial tool supporting European integration. The way it has developed over decades, both as concerns revenues and expenditure, superposed to a complex decision-making process, where member states retain veto rights in crucial respects, means that it currently displays a significant inertia, while its size and structure are not the most appropriate for endowing the Union with the means allowing it to best react to the present-day challenges. Tensions are also rising between the national interests of individual members and the common interest, which previous attempts to reconcile by way of special treatments granted to some countries are clearly unsustainable, while inducing additional rigidities to the budgetary construction. This obviates the need for a comprehensive reform, which the 2008/2009 budget review that the Commission was mandated to undertake may set in motion. The following paper attempts at taking stock of the most significant problems in need of a solution and to explore the most appropriate ways available for tackling them.
Future fiscal arrangements of the European Union
Since 1988, the EU budget has been set within a stable legal framework that has a number of distinctive characteristics. In the preceding twenty years, the budget had been one of the most hotly contested political battlegrounds.1 There were protracted disputes, on the one hand, between the Member States, with the UK especially anxious to lower its net contribution; and, on the other hand, between the European Parliament and the Council over decision-making, as the directly elected Parliament sought to flex its muscles. Regular crises in raising sufficient money were also a persistent problem. An agreement reached at the 1984 Fontainebleau European Council resolved the UK question by introducing the now infamous abatement. Subsequently, however, other Member States have also become substantial net contributors and have become increasingly insistent on finding ways of reducing their commitments. Various ad hoc compromises have been used to curb these perceived excesses, with the results that the legal position has become ever more messy, while also rendering the principles behind the budget increasingly opaque.2 The conflict between the institutions about the budget reached a peak in the mid-1980s, despite an attempt in 19823 to resolve the differences. Then, at the Brussels European Council in 1988, a new system of financing and structure of spending was agreed, along with a medium term expenditure framework – the Financial Perspective (FP) – and a cap on total outlays: the
General expression for the density effect for the ionization loss of charged particles
The equations for the density-effect correction $\ensuremath{\delta}(X)$ for the ionization loss as given in a previous paper have been extended to the case where $\ensuremath{\delta}({X}_{0})\ensuremath{\equiv}{\ensuremath{\delta}}_{0}g0$. Here ${X}_{0}$ is the lower limit of the range ${X}_{0}lXl{X}_{1}$, where a particularly simple expression for $\ensuremath{\delta}(X)$ applies; $X={log}_{10}(\frac{p}{{m}_{0}c})$, where $p$ is the momentum and ${m}_{0}$ is the mass of the incident particle. The case ${\ensuremath{\delta}}_{0}g0$ applies directly to the calculation of $\ensuremath{\delta}(X)$ for conductors (metals).