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.
The EU budget: A way forward
Centre for European Reform T: 00 44 20 7233 1199 29 Tufton Street F: 00 44 20 7233 1117 London SW1P 3QL UK info@cer.org.uk / www.cer.org.uk Many of the bitterest arguments in the European Union have been about money. That is partly because the budget is inherently a zero-sum game: more for one country means less for others. But it is also because, although the budget is small (just over 1 per cent of EU GDP, equivalent to 2 per cent of EU-wide public spending), it gives rise to sizeable flows of money in and out of finance ministry coffers.
The Use of Qualitative Information in Macro-Economic Policy Analysis
The majority of macro-economic policy models takes for granted that conflicts among objectives can be assessed by means of a tradeoff analysis. Such tradeoffs imply that sacrifices and benefits of various impacts of decisions can be measured on a cardinal scale, so that a conventional macro-economic utility or welfare analysis can be applied.