The next EU-budget: Which side are you supporting ?

[Diouf]

What are you talking about ?

Immigration to Austria from Eastern Europe increased, despite these countries getting more money from the EU than ever before.

Under the savings scenario, Eastern Europe would still receive a ton of money each year (even though I think payments to Eastern Europe should be phased out over the next decades, so that more money remains in the pockets of the current net-payers again). At some point, Eastern Europe needs to stand on their own feet financially again, without being propped up by our money.

Net migration from Central and Eastern European countries has started to fall in several of the wealthier Western member states, including Austria.

2016 numbers from official Austrian statistics: Net migration from EU/EFTA now down to 34.300, after it fell to 41.500 in 2015. The high point was 2014 with 48.200 net migration from EU/EFTA. This is also reflected in numbers for individual countries, that has had high migration flows. Romanians net migration to Austria fell from 12.710 in 2014 to 7.531 in 2016. Net migration by Hungarians fell from 7.798 in 2014 to 5.972 in 2016.

Similarly in Denmark. The net migration from Poland fell from 3.068 in 2015 to 2.316 in 2016 and 1.668 in 2017. Net migration from Romania fell from 3.581 in 2015 to 2.886 2016 to 2.518 in 2017.

With the econominc growth seen in many CEE countries and the increasing public benefits in many of these countries, this development seems likely to continue. 

[Diouf]

What the exact impact will be on the EU budget from the UK leaving is still very hard to gauge, since we still know quite little about how they will actually leave. Núñez Ferrer and Rinaldi is quite optimistic in their 2016 paper on the future on the EU budget, posing Brexit as a "a non-catastrophic event" for the EU budget as the UK would either choose to remain Norwegian-style close to/in the Single Market for which it would still pay substantial sums to the EU budget or it will take a distant approach to the Single Market, which will lead to significantly increased tariffs for the EU, which will cover a large part of the missing direct transfers. This is probably to the optimistic side, but shows how different scenarios effects the budget. Politically, it seems most likely that the UK would go for a rather distant relationsship to the Single Market. Perhaps the repeated warnings from the UK's own economists will make a difference, but I would not count on it at the moment.

Since the UK has mostly pushed for a lower budget, it seems certain that the alliance to lower spending will be weaker in the next round of negotiations. On the other hand, there seems to have been some indirect deals in previous times where the UK was allowed to keep its rebate by accepting e.g. French CAP support. Hopefully, these dynamics can be changed, and all the reformism Macron is talking about will also result in a continued reduction of direct CAP subsidies (without making it possible to make national subsidies of course). Most CEE countries have grown faster than other EU countries in the last years, so the GDP difference should also generally be smaller, and therefore the difference between net receipients and net beneficiares smaller.

[Diouf]

The fact that wealthy Ireland and super-wealthy Luxembourg are net recipients is amazing and extremely ridiculous as well.

Luxembourg is such a tiny country, that very few EU-funded projects in the country can tip the scale to net receipent in one year. Generally, Luxembourg is not a net receipient; this happened only twice from 2007 to 2016 (and one of the time with only 0,02 % of GNI). Normally, the country is a net payer of around 0,25% of GNI a year.