Publications on EU funds

This issue is devoted primarily to the countdown to EU Budget ‘D-day’, and the negotiations now reaching a troublesome climax on how approximately 1 trillion euros of EU money is to be spent across the continent in the 2014-20 budgetary period.

We also round up some recent developments at the EBRD and EIB. And if you think that US presidential candidate Mitt Romney has a monopoly on private equity and tax havens, think again.

This summer Latvia's minister for environment and regional development, along with some other like-minded politicians, appeared to kick-start a green revolution by proposing to set a 'green vision' for the small Baltic country's National Development Plan (NDP) for the 2014-2020 period.

The negotiations over the future EU budget for 2014-20 are well underway now, often being described under the epitaph 'EU budget battle'.

We tolerate no blood-letting on the pages of Bankwatch Mail. So Keti Medarova-Bergstrom, Senior Policy Analyst at the Institute for European Environmental Policy, and Pawel Swidlicki, Research Analyst at Open Europe, instead put their heads together to identify why and where EU budgetary spending has got it wrong in the past and propose how roughly one trillion euros can better serve Europe's environment, economy and people in the next funding period.

European decision-makers – lay down your budget weapons and listen!

In recent years Sofia municipality has been looking for a modern waste management solution, but all in the wrong direction. At the end of 2011, the Bulgarian capital submitted its latest application for funding to the European Commission. Regrettably, this featured a capital-intensive waste treatment facility and virtually no measures directed at higher levels of the so-called 'waste hierarchy' – namely prevention and reuse.