The long and winding road towards a tax-financed EU budget – constraints and design proposals from a legal prospective
(2021) Solid Financing of the EU — ISBN: [978-3-96543-281-9], p. 55-72, published
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- When addressing the topic of EU Taxes from a legal perspective, it is important from the outset to distinguish between two situations. On the one hand, it may refer to the creation of genuine European taxes by EU institutions, whose revenues would flow in the EU budget. This would require a major overhaul of the EU Treaties, by granting the EU level a constitutional power to tax and would de facto but also de iure transform the European Union is a fully-fledged federation, like the United States of America. On the other hand, it may also refer to a broader range of op-tions for reform, within the current Treaty framework, though which the proportion of EU own resources deriving from tax-based revenues would be significantly increased. Genuine EU taxes are not indeed the only way to make the own-resources system more dependent on tax re-sources and on this premise, the recent developments at the EU level as to the adoption of a new multiannual financial framework for the period 2021-2027 and the NextGeneration EU instrument leave some room is for caution optimism. This contribution is divided into three parts. First, it addresses the reason why the debate on the reform of EU tax-based own resources is important today. It is not just a matter of timing and of the need to com-pensate for the cost of the EU recovery program. There are other issues that have been pending for years, sometimes decades now, that justify opening this debate again. Then, it discusses legal-constitutional issues, such as the appropriate legal basis to reform EU tax-based own re-sources. Art. 311 TFEU, which entrusts the EU with the capacity to be funded by self-defined own resources and not by mere voluntary contributions of Member States, like other, more traditional, international organ-isations, is indeed not suitable to adopt legal instruments in the area of tax policy and tax harmonization, which are regulated by other provisions, with other procedures. The third part is a small policy contribution from a legal perspective to the discussion of the different options of new EU taxes on the table
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Traversa, E. (2021). The long and winding road towards a tax-financed EU budget – constraints and design proposals from a legal prospective. In Kube/Reimer (ed) (ed.), Solid Financing of the EU (p. p. 55-72). Lehmanns media. https://doi.org/10.11588/hfst.2021.16