BRUSSESL – European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on Monday called for the European Union (EU)’s 27 member states to pay more money into the bloc’s joint budget after Brexit.
Juncker made the remarks at a conference convened by the European Political Strategy Center, the European Commission’s in-house think tank.
The president is pushing the EU national governments to lift the imposed cap of 1 percent of EU gross national income being contributed to the bloc’s common budget, saying the money is just “one cup of coffee a day” for the European taxpayer.
He said his working hypothesis is that Britain will be leaving the EU in 2019 and the bloc needs to find ways of reacting to the loss of a significant number of billions of euros when a net contributor goes.
“We need more than one percent of GDP if we are to pursue EU policies and fund them adequately,” he said at the event.
“I think Europe is more than one cup of coffee a day,” he added.
In addition, Juncker said the common agriculture policy and cohesion funds should be modernized and be “flexible”, adding he was not in favor of drastic cuts in the two sectors which make up more than 50 percent of the EU budget.
Basically, the EU budget has three main types of “own resources”: contributions from Member States based on their income level measured by Gross National Income (GNI), contributions based on Value Added Tax (VAT), and customs duties collected at the external borders of the Union. Among the three types, the first one accounts for over 70 percent of the total EU budget.
