The European Commission is currently formulating the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), a medium-term budget framework that fixes the EU’s revenues and expenditures, including how much should be allocated annually to each objective and each country. The next one starts in 2014, and much more than money is at stake.
BRUSSELS – The European Commission is now in the process of formulating the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), a medium-term budget framework that fixes the European Union’s revenues and expenditures, including how much should be allocated annually to each objective and each country. The next one starts in 2014 – and much more than money is at stake.
The debate over the next year will be significantly influenced and constrained by national interests. Member states, facing serious fiscal problems of their own, are unlikely to agree to pay more to the EU budget, which will thus probably remain at 1% of EU-wide GDP, as in the previous MFF. But this is no excuse to give up on overhauling the budget’s role in EU governance.
The EU budget is unlike any other. First, size is not everything. The budget’s potential goes well beyond its face value. For example, under the Medium-Term Financial Assistance (MTFA) facility, the EU provides liquidity to non-eurozone members in balance-of-payment difficulties and, more recently, also to eurozone countries. It does so by using implicit EU budget guarantees to raise capital on financial markets. Thus, indirectly, the budget has enabled leveraging of financing in order to support crisis countries – an expression of European solidarity that has gone fully unnoticed.
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Following the latest G20 summit, the G7 should be thinking seriously about deepening its own ties with more non-aligned countries. If the Ukraine war drags on, and if China continues to threaten to take Taiwan by force, the G20 will be split between friends of the BRICS and friends of the G7.
sees the grouping as increasingly divided between friends of the G7 and friends of China and Russia.
To prevent catastrophic climate change and accelerate the global transition to a net-zero economy, policymakers and asset owners urgently need to rethink how we channel capital at scale. The key is to develop new financial instruments that are profitable, liquid, and easily accessible to savers and investors globally.
explain what it will take to channel private capital and savings toward sustainable development.
BRUSSELS – The European Commission is now in the process of formulating the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), a medium-term budget framework that fixes the European Union’s revenues and expenditures, including how much should be allocated annually to each objective and each country. The next one starts in 2014 – and much more than money is at stake.
The debate over the next year will be significantly influenced and constrained by national interests. Member states, facing serious fiscal problems of their own, are unlikely to agree to pay more to the EU budget, which will thus probably remain at 1% of EU-wide GDP, as in the previous MFF. But this is no excuse to give up on overhauling the budget’s role in EU governance.
The EU budget is unlike any other. First, size is not everything. The budget’s potential goes well beyond its face value. For example, under the Medium-Term Financial Assistance (MTFA) facility, the EU provides liquidity to non-eurozone members in balance-of-payment difficulties and, more recently, also to eurozone countries. It does so by using implicit EU budget guarantees to raise capital on financial markets. Thus, indirectly, the budget has enabled leveraging of financing in order to support crisis countries – an expression of European solidarity that has gone fully unnoticed.
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