Oldal 54 [54]
52] Zsófia Kollányi
As an illustration of the abovementioned phenomena, Figure 2 presents the
decile distribution of income in the EU Member States in 2018, in PPS, which
is the Eurostats standard of purchasing power parity (a measure of income
that adjusts nominal incomes for the impact of different price levels in the
various Member States).
It must also be pointed out, however, that the interpretation (and even the
proper measurement, for that matter; see Astryan et al. 2020) of the operating
budgetary balance is far from being straightforward. Considering relative
rather than absolute measures (see Figure 3), we find that while net recipients
gain between 1.5 and 4 per cent relative to their GNI, net contributors lose
less than 0.5 per cent on the same scale.
Operating budgetary balance 2018 (96 GNI)
+4,50%
+4,00%
+3,50%
+3,00%
+2,50%
+2,00%
+1,50%
+1,00%
+0,50% | |
+0,00% 11
-0,50% RAR ROO RA BE IE LU MT CY SI EE HR LV BG SK LT ES CZ RO PT EL HU PL
-1,0096
Figure 3: Operating budgetary balance, 2018 (per cent of Gross National Income)
Source of data: European Commission 2019
Despite the significantly different implications of the relative measures,
putting these two together - better-off Member States being net supporters
of new EU members (which is true), and in the meantime many people from
newly-joined countries moving to western Member States as immigrants,
taking jobs and/or pushing down wages and/or exploiting western welfare
systems (which is not true; see Wadsworth et al. 2016) - apparently created
such a strong sense of injustice that it led to the decision of the UK to leave
the EU.
Despite the original claim that this chapter will not be about Brexit, there
has been a lot of talk about it thus far. The reason is that Brexit - and especially
the debate surrounding it - is a culmination of all the lingering problems of
the European Union that had been previously swept under the rug, neglected
and denied. Brexit was something nobody had really thought possible, so
when it did materialise, after the first shock everyone was suddenly forced
to ponder the implications.
In fact, in 2017, a year after the Brexit referendum, the European Parliament
held a debate about the issue of “rising inequalities” in the EU (European
Parliament 2017). Although this debate was not directly related to Brexit,
many of the speeches addressed the political destabilisation and institutional