Talk:Budget of the European Union/Archive 1

""Money to EU (billions) section of contributiuons table"" Serious error in that if you arange the "Money to EU (billions)" collomn from most to least (or vice versa) it organizes only by the first number of each field, not by the actual value of the field. thus it might go 1, 137, 23 etc... 137 is more than 23! try playing with it if you don't see what i mean.Olyus (talk) 10:01, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Member State contributions table

Why does the table showing contributions from member states not match the numbers displayed on the EU Budget report found on the Europa website. The Expenditure figures are identical to those shown on the report, but all contributions show a difference.

EU budget for 2006 and previous years found here -

http://ec.europa.eu/budget/library/publications/fin_reports/fin_report_06_en.pdf page 33 and 63.

How was the "total contribution" figures calculated and where did they come from?
 * It was originally posted on the page European Union statistics. I added the expenditure figures to an existing table, then copied it here where it belongs. I have no idea where the older figures came from. However, the EU seems to amend figures retrospectively each year, so small discrepancies may be due to comparing current and older estimates of the budgets. Sandpiper (talk) 21:29, 23 December 2007 (UTC)


 * And why was there no column for net contributions? And why is the last column misdescribed as "% of total EU budget" when it is in fact (if the numbers are correct) "% of total EU expenditure"? And the whole thing is out-of-date. We need a breakdown of whither and whence for 2007-2013.


 * Full marks, though, for including administrative bungs in the "expenditure" columns. It should be more widely known that the world's richest country (Luxembourg) is one of the greatest net recipients of EU largesse.


 * A new table is needed. I started amending this one but a snapshot of 2006 is not very useful. What we need is a resortable by-country tabulation of the 2007-2013 budget. I might have a stab at it this weekend. Then again, I might not. (But it *is* needed, so if someone else wants to give it a go ...)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vinny Burgoo (talk • contribs) 18:40, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Budget 2015
Link for updating the information in this article. I don't see this linked or used here yet. Hope this is of any help. Show a total income of 140billion in 2014 and an expected 142billion in 2015.

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/budget/www/index-en.htm 109.200.192.66 (talk) 10:35, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Wrong title?
Surely the budget of the European Union is the sum of the budgets of all its members. But this article is about the Budget of the European Union institutions. It seems to me that this is waht should be the title of the article. Comments? --Red King (talk) 01:48, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

European Union is not all countries of europe. EU is Organization with own budget.213.164.125.109 (talk) 19:36, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
 * The European Union certainly is all countries that are members of it. That's what its name says - it is the Union of European States, in other words. The Parliament, Commission etc are not the Union, any more than the national parliaments and civil-services are the nations. It seems to me that "Budget of the adminstration of the European Union" would be a more accurate title. --Red King (talk) 22:39, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

What about fines?
The EU levies huge fines, like the one on microsoft, and the ones on the member states such as france and greece. Where does this money go in the budget? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.157.136.194 (talk) 11:00, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually it was the European Commission that levied the fines, on behalf of the Union. The fine (which was hardly huge to Microsoft, let alone the EC, goes into the overall budget and helps defray the cost of anti-trust investigations. --Red King (talk) 22:41, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

2007-2013 update
I've started on this with a table, but I can't get the final (per capita) column to sort properly. Can anyone help? Vinny Burgoo (talk) 21:44, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

2006 published figures and the Wikipedia published table
The Annexe 4 of the document http://ec.europa.eu/budget/library/publications/fin_reports/fin_report_06_en.pdf is confusing as they have a sub total column for the TOR (Traditional Own Resources) figures, it needs to be remembered the TOR column is composed of the next four columns. This is probably why the table in Wikipedia differs from the EU's document since the TOR figure has been lost.


 * Well spotted, non-signing contributor! The Wiki-published table's Total Contributions don't include the Traditional Own Resources displayed (clumsily) in the Commission's table. (A very strange error, despite the clumsy source material. Perhaps someone took offence at the "Traditional" in TOR.) Vinny Burgoo (talk) 21:12, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

intro
"The European Union (EU) is an association of 27 independent member states. The Administration of the Union has a parliament, a civil service and a judiciary that is distinct from those of the member states. These arms administer the application of treaties, laws and agreements between the member states and their expenditure on common policies throughout the Union. To pay for this, t" is un-needed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.140.57.113 (talk) 14:01, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

State by state analysis
The numeric columns in the chart sort by string values e.g. 100, 15, 20 instead of 15, 20, 100. Can anyone fix this? Stutley (talk) 11:37, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Will adding leading zero's make a difference? I don't want to try it out myself in case I make a botch job of it. 212.100.3.44 (talk) 17:46, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Source: FY 2007

 * FINAL ADOPTION of amending budget No 5 of the European Union for the financial year 2007 (2007/721/EC, Euratom) Anameofmyveryown (talk) 12:49, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Budget is not legitimate
Why is there no mention that the auditors have refused to sign off the EU budget for several years, from memory I don't think it has been signed off since the 90's, surely the fact that the independant auditors will not sign the budget off (if this happened to a private company they would be closed down). MattUK (talk) 12:06, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Open Europe estimates for EU-27 budget for 2007-2013 in euros (€)
This estimates are wrong because the amount shown here is the maxium amount of money that can be taken by a country... many eastern countries are projected to absorb maxium 25% of that amount... In 2007-2008 Romania took only 6%! from EU funds (176 mil eu out of 3,1 bl eu). So this data is misleading because is just a posibility (the maximum one!) of absorbtion of EU funds —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.36.190.155 (talk) 07:21, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Jep, those numbers are just random lies all over the place, no idear who came up with them. 84.57.118.87 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 21:20, 15 June 2010 (UTC).

Broken Chart
Using the little buttons to arrange by a given column doesn't work right. It goes from 86 to 8.something and then 56, etc... It doesn't actually put things in order; it just arranges by that first digit. I suppose this could have something to do with my browser, but perhaps someone not using Chrome could check to see if it's reproducible in other user agents.

Open Europe is a lobby group
Open Europe is an outspoken anti-EU lobby group, charts and information sourced from them should be labelled as such. 145.94.58.41 (talk) 11:02, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
 * ^This 62.64.179.156 (talk) 15:51, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

I totally agree with this comment. Using Open Europe as a primary data source when the budget information is publically published shows either laziness or bias. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.24.203.212 (talk) 21:40, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

The data is absurd and is the result of a British Anti-EU group. The UK does not pay as much. I think the official data of the EU-commission is much more accurate. -- —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.121.66.233 (talk) 23:18, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

German wikipedia
In the German wikipedia, there is the real data. The data of the British Anti-european group is false and tries to paint a picture of a UK that pays more than it acutally does. Remove it!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.121.14.198 (talk) 15:14, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Financial programming and budget website has changed
http://ec.europa.eu/budget/

Deep links to pages and/or pdf to that website should be adapted. There is currently a redirection for static papges, but this is temporary. I know this cuz I made the new website.

Links to pdf will break.

I'm didn't edit the links myself, cuz I'm not sure what I'm doing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.136.104.199 (talk) 19:48, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Finlands losses
Firstly, excuse me for my horrid editing skills but I dont do this too often. The article here on wikipedia says that finland is -13 billion, im not sure if that is correct? Here is another article by a large finnish financial newspaper claiming that eu has actually cost us -30 billion euros, crisis funds alone. I am completely worthless at even attempting a translation so all I can do is hope that another finns comes around and does that. The exact figured mentioned is 30,4 billion euros to eu. http://www.taloussanomat.fi/kansantalous/2011/10/05/yllatys-suomen-piikissa-jo-30-miljardin-kriisivastuut/201114170/12?ref=tf1 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.85.130.7 (talk) 14:28, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Unreliable source for net contributions data
The data is false. You should use the real data and not British propaganda. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.121.4.205 (talk) 15:42, 15 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I have now replaced the information based on data from a more reliable source (Deutsche Bank Research). --Boson (talk) 23:25, 15 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Why did you use the "Standard, with traditional own resources" column from this source? The numbers are highly misleading, as is explained in detail in the article btw. The data from the "Commission approach" column is the official number and should be stated! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.125.106.29 (talk) 21:24, 2 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Ask me something easier! I remember that I gave the matter considerable thought at the time, but no longer remember my exact thought processes. I did think that, as the Deutsche Bank article argues, the method used has the potential to mislead or be used deliberately to advance a point of view ("The net position can be calculated in a variety of ways. Depending on the method used the resulting figures will differ, and their inclusion in the political debate will depend on how opportune they are."), and therefore it would be best to include all the methods presented in that article, possibly indicating the actual diferences in the rankings that would result, in order to be of practical use to the reader who wanted to judge the facts for him/herself. I can list some of the considerations that may have influenced my decision:
 * Because the above IP editor had blanked the existing figures, on the grounds of them being British propaganda, I wanted to produce figures from a reliable third-party source as quickly as possible (preferably before an edit-war started).
 * I thought that, ideally, all the methods and calculations should be presented, but that this would only make real sense if the effects were explained.
 * I was concerned about avoiding original research.
 * Within the time constraints I was under at the time, I decided to present only one version.
 * I wanted to avoid, as much as possible, any impression that the figures were being subsequently massaged. I therefore wanted to avoid using (only) results that appeared to exclude something or to have been "adjusted" by the Commission. This may have been the main reason for choosing the row that I did.
 * I vaguely intended to review the matter later and possibly add additional columns, but I wanted to wait and see if any edit warring ensued.
 * I wanted to avoid presenting and structuring the information in a way that was too close to that of the Deutsche Bank article (for copyright reasons).
 * Please feel free to add the other rows from the Deutsche Bank article (i.e.probably columns in the Wikipedia article).
 * I would be very happy if you analysed the figures and presented on the Talk page how the different methods influence the rankings of the major net contributors/recipients. I tend to think, personally, that such an analysis could be presented in the article, since only simple arithmetic and ranking are involved (or a verbalization of information presented graphically in the Deutsche Bank article), but others might see a violation of the boundary between alternative presentation and original research. At any rate, we would have to consider how to present such an analysis in a neutral way.
 * At first glance, which of the five methods is used does not appear to affect the ranking of the three largest contributors and recipients in absolute terms, but it does affect the ranking for the per capita and % of GDP figures.
 * --Boson (talk) 22:50, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Does anyone know why the Net Contributions information in this article is so different to the data given on the European Union page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_statistics#EU_budget)?

For example...

On this page it says: −6,046 for Italy and -3,865 for the UK.

On the EU page it says: -3,437 for Italy and -5,445 for the UK.

That's a massive difference even the figures are for different years. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Garygateaux (talk • contribs) 15:48, 22 November 2012 (UTC)