Analysis: How can the EU’s financial resources system be reformed?

Bernard Marx, economist at Confrontations Europe, argues that the EU’s current financial system is no longer appropriate and therefore needs to be reformed.

In his article ‘How can the EU’s financial resources system be reformed?’, Bernard Marx points to the shortcomings of the EU’s resources for the European budget. He says that “the system ensures a steady flow of receipts and has low administrative costs but is otherwise totally defective” The author is especially critical of the democratic deficit in the system as “there is no link whatsoever with the citizens and the taxpayers”, noting that the European Parliament is not allowed into the debate.

Furthermore, Bernard Marx highlights the difficulties of the budgetary debate as “all governments are very attached to their sovereignty on tax decisions without taking sufficiently into consideration the bottlenecks that this creates in Europe.”

He adds that the measures taken so far by former EU presidencies are not enough as the EU “needs to commit itself to coming up with a result: creating a European tax or European taxes and in parallel facilitating the scrapping of all reimbursements calculated on net contributions by 2014”.