Comments on the CEPS policy brief “A new Budget for the European Union?”

The paper by Iozzo and Micossi and Salvemini is very interesting, and for such a limited amount of pages, one of the clearest papers I have read. It puts together the best ideas of a number of existing works (Sapir, 2003, Heinemann et al. 2008; De La Fuente, 2008), and then makes them more relevant and better targeted to the realities of the EU budget. It is based, nevertheless, on a very questionable redistributive and allocative “European public goods” budget items separation. This separation looks well argued, but partially collapses if one looks more closely at the actual use of the funds, in particular those of the Cohesion Policy.