The intention of the ongoing review of the EU budget is to create a budget that is better adapted at facing future challenges. At the same time it raises fundamental questions about what the EU is and should do.

The European Commission recently launched a discussion on the architecture of direct payments, with a view to rethinking the philosophy of agricultural regulation within the EU. The debate has been pursued under the Swedish EU Presidency.

Despite substantial changes since its inception the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) remains the most extensive common policy, accounting for almost half of the EU’s budget and almost half of the legislation. The CAP was a decisive component of European integration in the past; but what role should it play in the future? This European Policy Analysis aims at providing a vision for the CAP after 2013.

The report, which has been written by researchers at the Institute for European Environmental Policy, assesses to what extent the EU budget has contributed to achieving the EU’s climate change objectives and sets out arguments on how and why the EU budget might support the fight against climate change in the future.   The analysis shows that there has been little focus on these objectives so far and that this is also true for the current 2007-2013 Financial Perspective.

In December 2006 the Institute for World Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (IWE) was commissioned by SIEPS to map the interests of the EU Member States and their positions with regard to the EU budget, in order to analyse both the prospects for reform, as well as the possible content of such a reform, during the budget review 2008/2009. The study employs a twin-track approach.

The report, written by Jorge Nuñéz Ferrer, Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), analyses how the own resources system can be reformed to foster better decision-making in relation to policy-making in the EU. The author argues that a combined strategy of policy reform and changes in the own resources system is necessary and the report therefore proposes to finance the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in a different way.

SIEPS’ annual conference 2007 was held on the theme The Purse of the European Union: Setting Priorities for the Future. The conference was arranged in the light of the EU budget review process that was launched in September 2007 and which is expected to be concluded in 2008-2009.

This European Policy Analysis proposes a method for analysing the EU budget which combines economic, political and legal aspects. This integrated and multidisciplinary approach was lacking in the previous literature on the EU budget.

The EU budget should be reviewed 2008 / 09. The author proposes a "Zero Base" approach in which no expenses or income is considered sacred, but are tested as if they were suggested for the first time.

In the negotiations on the Union’s annual expenditures decision is taken by qualified majority voting (QMV). In this report Professor Mika Widgrén investigates the relationship between the Council voting rules and EU budget transfers by using a power politics model.