The Future of EU Finance: New Funding and Allocation Options?

The question of new ways of financing the EU budget and the use of its funds has arisen, not least because of the planned exit of the UK from the EU. For Thiess Büttner, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, it would make sense for the EU to abandon the obsolete value-added tax and to limit itself to traditional funds and the proven GNI-based resources. Since the EU does not undertake Europe-wide tasks exclusively or predominantly, Michael Broer, Ostfalia University of Applied Science, Wolfsburg, believes it is also not necessary that this institution finances itself through its own revenues. Only when the EU increasingly turns to tasks with a European added value does the idea of an EU tax gain in importance. Clemens Fuest, Ifo Institute, shows that with the current institutional structures of the EU, the abolition of the current value-added tax as well as national rebates and a reform of expenditures could bring about substantial improvements. Christian Waldhoff, Humboldt University of Berlin, asks whether, in the current legal framework, it is possible to transfer the power of taxation to the EU. Margit Schratzenstaller, Austrian Institute for Economic Research, Vienna, points out that the potential of EU taxation as a means for strengthening the sustainability orientation of taxation in the EU has been largely neglected. She advocates the introduction of “sustainability-oriented, tax-based resources”. Peter Becker, German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), Berlin, sees the main problem of the current EU budgetary policy in the one-sided focus of the member states on a purely fiscal cost-benefit analysis of their membership on the basis of their national net balances. Jörg Haas, Jacques Delors Institute, Berlin, would like to use Brexit as an opportunity for EU budget reform that should simplify the sources of income and focus the tasks on common European goods. Charles B. Blankart, Humboldt University of Berlin, proposes a so-called elimination procedure to finance the EU budget after Brexit.