Oldal 54 [54]
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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
