Making Next-Generation EU a permanent tool

Policy Study

The issue of making Next-Generation EU (NGEU) a permanent tool, and thus of the reimbursement of EU loans and grants, opens up the possibility of a fundamental political leap: it offers an opportunity to remedy the depoliticisation of EU policies and opens a window for a breakthrough towards a “political Europe”.

With a permanent NGEU, Europeans could decide to allocate for themselves a share of the common wealth drawn from the immense private profits made from the internal market.

A permanent tool may fulfil three separate purposes:

• Supporting growth and resilience-oriented reforms in the member states
• Creating a central fiscal capacity for macroeconomic stabilisation purposes
• Creating a central fiscal capacity to finance the provision of EU public goods

In this policy study, the authors argue that only the production of European public goods financed by a truly European tax system, not by national contributions, would enable the creation of a genuinely democratic basis for the EU. It would be a further step in the European integration process that would permit the EU to face urgent challenges.

A permanent tool could be established either by the revision of treaties or by the establishment of new intergovernmental arrangements (on the blueprint of the European stability mechanism). In this latter respect, we propose the creation of a European Public Investment Agency capable of planning investment projects and implementing them, in cooperation with member states.

The debate on a central fiscal capacity should be led in parallel with reforming the Stability and Growth Pact to ensure fiscal space is created in the EU.

Find here a summary in French of the policy study.

This policy study is part of the Recovery Watch series of publications. The Recovery Watch is a research that monitors the Recovery and Resilience Facility and assesses its social impact in different countries.

Led by FEPS, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) and the Institut Emile Vandervelde (IEV), in collaboration with several first-rate research organisations.