Korovnikova Natalia Alexandrovna – Ph.D. in Political Sciences, Leading Researcher, INION RAS Smirnov Sergey Nikolaevich – Sc.D. in Economics, Leading Researcher, INION RAS
Despite the current geopolitical fluctuations that divert significant financial resources to foreign policy issues, the European Union’s Green Deal remains one of the main lines of its domestic policy, and achieving its highly ambitious goals also requires considerable investment, including budgetary funds from EU member states. In this regard, the development of a green budgeting mechanism has become one of the priority tasks of the European establishment. It should be acknowledged that certain measures are being taken in this direction by European structures (the European Commission conducts regular studies aimed at analyzing the greening of EU member states’ budgets; the EU Green Budgeting Reference Framework (GBRF) has been developed; several projects were implemented in 2021–2025 under the Green Budgeting Technical Support Instrument (TSI) program), and the positive (at least formally) experience of these measures indicates certain progress in resolving the green budget issue. Noting the growing attention to green budgeting in the EU, the authors conducted an analysis of the greening of budgets in EU member states using statistical data published by Eurostat. The resulting series allowed us to conclude that over the past decade, EU countries have achieved significant quantitative progress in collecting green taxes and shaping their green budgeting systems. The territorial structure of these indicators was analyzed: in particular, it was found that up to half of the taxes collected, as well as more than half of green spending in EU countries, are accounted for by just three countries – Germany, France, and Italy. The results obtained were compared with the qualitative findings from the European Commission’s Green Budgeting Reports for 2023 and 2025. As a result, certain achievements in the development of methods and mechanisms for forming green budgets in countries participating in these EC surveys were recognized and verified. Firstly, an increase in the number of EU countries practicing various forms of green budgeting was recorded. Secondly, drivers and prerequisites for effectively addressing the budgetary issue in the green sector were identified, such as professionalization of target working groups, program-based and results-oriented budgeting, standardization of green budget development procedures, etc. At the same time, significant barriers to greening the budgets of EU member states were recognized – both endogenous ones related to the need to coordinate evaluation and budget reporting systems, as well as to harmonize green budget policies considering the specific needs of countries, and exogenous ones, primarily governed by the turbulence of the geopolitical situation, the dynamics of which in the foreseeable future will determine not only the future of the Green Deal and the effectiveness of its key green budgeting instrument in EU countries, but also the international climate agenda as a whole.
European Union. Green Deal, greening budgets, green spending and taxes, achievements of green budgeting, endogenous/exogenous barriers of green budgeting, geopolitical landscape.
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