Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 26 March 2019
195. Deputy Pearse Doherty asked the Minister for Finance further to Parliamentary Question No. 105 of 12 March 2019, the EU contributions to be made by Ireland in each of the next five years if the contributions were based on GNI*, based on best forecasts; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [13299/19]
View answerMember State contributions to the EU Budget are calculated by the EU Commission in line with the provisions outlined in the Own Resource Decision (ORD) Regulation (2014/335). This Decision lays down the three main sources of EU revenue, or ‘Own Resources’:
- Customs duties in respect of trade with non-member countries and levies on sugar production within the Union. These are collectively known as “Traditional Own Resources” (TOR).
- VAT: the VAT own resource is calculated on the basis of a notional harmonised rate.
- Gross National Income (GNI)-based contributions: the amount due is calculated by taking the same proportion of each Member State’s GNI. The GNI-based resource is the Budget-balancing item; it covers the difference between total expenditure in the Budget and the revenue from the other resources, subject to the overall Own Resources ceiling.
The GNI component of the EU budget accounted for 56.3 per cent of the budget's total revenue in 2017.
Ireland is obliged to make GNI payments to the EU budget based on Ireland's share of overall EU GNI. To accurately estimate the application of GNI star for Ireland’s EU Budget contributions would require making the same technical adjustments to the GNIs of each of the remaining EU-27 Member States. Such data is not available for all other Member States.
Regrettably, therefore, it is not possible to assess the impact of moving EU budget contributions from GNI to GNI star in the absence of such data.
It is worth recalling that GNI star, or Modified GNI, was developed by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) as a supplementary method for measuring and analysing Irish domestic economic activity by stripping out the impact of globalisation activities. It is important to stress that, from a legal perspective, the CSO is compelled to produce existing macroeconomic statistics (GDP, GNI, etc.) in accordance with internationally-agreed methodologies.
