Authors Iain Begg | Gabriel Glöckler | Anke Hassel ... - The Europaeum

Chapter 4
The EU budget:
“not fit for purpose”
but change is afoot,
gradually
Alan Mayhew
The European Union budget is “not fit for purpose” in the global age. Its
critics are numerous, from the European Parliament, across government
and amongst economists, lawyers and political scientists. The criticisms
are clear: First, instead of supporting new policies tackling future
challenges, the budget supports a low productivity sector, agriculture, and
relatively poor regions in rich countries; Second, large budget rebates to
relatively rich countries, together with side payments, agreed to obtain
unanimity in the Council, severely limit transparency and equity in the
budget; Third, policymaking in the Union is plagued by the net budget
balance concerns of member states; Fourth, the Union’s own resources
are in fact transfers from the member states, which divorce the budgetary
authority from the taxpayers, and which, in the electoral process, therefore
divorce European parliamentarians from responsibility for expenditure;
Finally, the medium-term financial framework of the Union is not subject
to influence from the European Parliament and severely limits flexibility
in the budget to tackle rapidly changing policy requirements.
Identifying these problems is naturally far easier than curing them. The
great difficulty is the need for unanimity amongst the 27 member states to
make serious changes to the annual budget and the financial framework.
While the overall budget is less than 1% of EU Gross National Income
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