Is the EU a waste of money?

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In the last few years, the EU budget has become a major topic of public discourse – whether in the media, or in our neighbourhood cafes. Something that once felt so remote has gone mainstream.

A lot of that is due to Brexit, and a lot of the conversations have had to do with specifically how much the European Union costs us, and our countries. So we decided to figure out whether there’s any truth in the often-heard exclamations that the EU costs us too much.

In this episode you’ll find out (without a lot of math or statistics):

• What is the EU budget? How is it decided, collected and spent? How big is it?
• How much does each European contribute to the EU budget?
• Why do some countries pay more into the EU budget than others do?
• What is cohesion?
• Why do people believe some of the myths about the EU floating around, and how can we use a moment of crisis and turn it into an opportunity?

At the European Investment Bank, the EU bank, we have all kinds of experts, who can challenge our assumptions, notions and prejudices about anything from climate to cybercrime and from healthcare to urbanisation. In this episode you will hear our Vice-President Alexander Stubb, as well as Mariusz Krukowski, the European Investment Bank’s senior policy adviser who works on EU budget issues and Brexit, among other things.

So that you don’t miss any episodes, subscribe to Monster Under the Bed on your phone’s podcast app. You can do it in iTunes, Acast and many other podcast platforms as well. In each episode of the podcast, we fight one imaginary monster under the bed and win the battle for a more sensible way of doing things.

Let us know if you can think of a monster we should expose on future episodes. Get in touch on Twitter @AllarTankler.