Fifty ways to waste your money
The EU's accountants – the European Court of Auditors (ECA) – have refused to give the EU’s accounts a clean bill of health for the 15th year in a row, owing to fraud and mismanagement in the budget. Like last year, the auditors did sign off the Commission’s own accounts, saying that they accurately represented how much money was raised and spent.
However, the most important issue is the fact that the EU budget is hugely wasteful and irrational in terms of what the money is actually spent on, and where the money is spent. To illustrate this, Open Europe has produced a list of 50 new examples of EU waste designed to show the types of peculiar projects on which EU money is being wasted, such as a luxury golf course in the Algarve.
To read the press release, click here
To read Open Europe's 50 new examples of EU waste, click here
How a Conservative government could tackle EU social policy
In the first in a series of papers looking at which policy areas a Conservative government should prioritise under its declared aim to “repatriate” powers from the EU, Open Europe details how the Conservatives could go about the repatriation of EU social and employment policy in practice.
To read the briefing click here.
EU's alternative investment Directive to cost industry and investors billions
To read the Open Europe's report on the costs and likely impacts of the proposed Directive, click here
Open Europe in the news
Open Europe makes the case for a new kind of Europe. Click here to see recent coverage of our work
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events
Eurozone: out of the woods, or off the cliff?
Tuesday 27 October 2009, 10.30am - 12pm, London
Speakers included:
Otmar Issing, former member of the Executive Board, European Central Bank
David Marsh, Chairman of the London and Oxford Group
Derek Scott, former Economics Advisor to Tony Blair
Chair: William Keegan, Senior Economics Commentator, The Observer
For more information about Open Europe events, see our events page.
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12 November 2009
New Open Europe briefing: EU social policy to cost UK £71 billion over next decade
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analysis
Writing on EUobserver, Open Europe's Mats Persson argues that the EU budget is “unmanageable” and that large parts of regional and rural development spending should be repatriated to the member states.