91997E3815

WRITTEN QUESTION E-3815/97 by Caroline Jackson (PPE) to the Commission (28 November 1997)

Subject: Net transfers to the EU budget

According to the Economist of 18 October 1997, the European Commission was unable, at a recent meeting of Ecofin, to give figures for net contributions to the EU budget for each Member State. Given the importance of this subject, and the high degree of public interest in it, will the Commission now take the opportunity to publish the list of net contributions to the EU budget for each Member State, using the latest available figures?

Answer given by Mr Liikanen on behalf of the Commission (14 January 1998)

In a paper forwarded to the EcoFin Council (a copy is sent direct to the Honourable Member and to the Parliament's secretariat) the Commission explained the reasons why it does not produce estimates of budgetary positions for the Member States.

To recapitulate, the Commission contends that budgetary flows do not capture all the benefits from membership of the Community. Community membership, which gives rise to financial and non-financial advantages as well as obligations, has a non-budgetary dimension the importance of which dwarfs the budgetary dimension. For example, the benefits from the pursuit of common objectives, such as trade liberalisation and European economic integration, cannot be evaluated in terms of budgetary flows alone. Moreover, flows from the Community budget invariably benefit not only the recipients but other Member States in the form of return flows. Typical examples are structural funds and external expenditure, where the implementation of projects often gives rise to purchases of goods and services from other Member States.

Furthermore, there is no single definition of a budgetary balance. This inevitably makes possible the design of various methods of approximating the net budgetary benefits from membership of the Community, and the choice of particular method often reflects the desire to highlight a particular point of view or to defend a specific issue. In view of these difficulties, the Commission neither produces nor does it endorse any particular method of calculating the Member States' budgetary positions.