In view of the increasingly intense dispute over payments to the common household, the EU Commission has referred to the advantages of the single market.
Even conservative estimates suggest that the economic benefits of the single market for EU countries exceed their contributions significantly, said the head of the budget department, Gert Jan Koopman.
Koopman referred to calculations by his department as well as investigations by the Munich Ifo Institute and the Bertelsmann Foundation. However, relative to economic output, Germany benefits slightly less from the common market than the EU average. The annual profit of 336 billion euros due to the advantages of the domestic market corresponds to 7.9 percent of German economic output. The remaining 27 member states (excluding Great Britain) have a combined total of 9.1 percent.
Ifo-Institut and Bertelsmann-Stiftung come to lower results for Germany as well as for the entire EU. However, according to their calculations, the single market also brings more than it costs. For Germany, the contributions are currently around € 26 billion annually. According to the European Commission, this amount is set to rise to € 35 billion by 2027.
The background to the Commission's publication is the currently pending negotiations on the EU's next seven-year budget from 2021 to 2027. The EU Commission has raised its contribution payments by about one percent due to the budget hole resulting from the withdrawal of the net payer and new EU tasks proposed at 1.144 percent of economic output. The European Parliament even demands 1.3 percent.
The commission also demands that all rebates for net contributors, such as Germany, be phased out. This would threaten Germany with a surge in annual payments to Brussels. The Federal Government and countries like Austria and the Netherlands want to stick to the current contribution level as well as the discounts.
EU Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger (CDU) had recently sharply criticized Germany's attitude and deplored the spread of "false information" in the debate. He also pointed out that the classical view of net contributions was no longer up-to-date. More and more EU funds are now being used, for example, in development and refugee policies and therefore, of course, often do not flow back into the Member States.