Who gave and who received: more on Bulgaria and European funds
We're a fairly closed community here: only those who know it exists come here; there's no algorithm that can "shove it in your face" like the algorithms on other platforms do, occasionally suggesting something surprising, until they think they understand what you like, and they start to bore you with only that! That's why I occasionally express myself on Facebook, a platform I joined essentially to fuel local political gossip (there's that in the wider world!), but which responds well to interesting content. For example, when Bolghèria joined the euro, I took one of the many graphs I've shown you, posted it on Facebook with a quick comment , and got this response:
The interesting thing is that 19,479 people who don't follow me still viewed the content (the power of the algorithm), and over a hundred commented. These aren't mind-blowing numbers (I only do those when I slander our friend Uva, the most beloved of Italians!), but it's enough to get fresh and spontaneous feedback, considering you're not there (except for one I wouldn't even want here, but I'm a good-natured person).
The comments from those who haven't followed our path aren't always very well-informed, and sometimes they're genuinely hilarious (there's never a shortage of people who come to me and explain that the EU isn't working and we should leave the euro, usually because they heard it from one of the many followers who parasitize our work). However, there are also some quality comments, and it's still useful to know what "the public" thinks.
What struck me about the comments on Bulgaria is that many of them linked Bulgaria's entry into the euro to an increased burden on our net contribution to the EU budget. This is obviously not true, because participation (active or passive) in the EU budget is tied to membership of the EU, not the eurozone, and therefore all the states of the seven-speed Europe (as of January 1, in fact, six) that are also members of the European Union already contribute to (or contribute to) the budget. The fact that Bulgaria, an EU member state, decides to join the euro will not immediately lead to major changes in terms of our contribution to the EU budget. Ukraine's entry would be a completely different matter!
It then occurred to me that perhaps it would be a good idea for us too to delve deeper into the topic of how the EU budget works, which we last addressed a couple of years ago .
How it works is simple: the fundamental principle is that of cohesion, which essentially means that the richest must give and the poorest must take. Therefore, all 27 member states contribute to the EU budget, but the richest give more than they take, and the poorest take more than they give. It follows that for the richest, net credits from the EU budget are negative (that is, they are a positive net contribution, which is a negative net credit: money that leaves the country), while for the poorest, net credits from the EU budget are positive (that is, they are a negative net contribution, which is a positive net credit: money that enters the country). The rich are contributors, and the poor are recipients (yes, I know that in Anglicized we say contributors and recipients, but that's just me and you can't help it), with two notable exceptions.
Obviously, since the budget is zero, the sum of these net amounts is zero, abstracting from some accounting frills: the amount the "rich" have in deficit towards the EU, the amount the "poor" have in surplus towards the EU.
The main criterion for assessing a country's economic condition is nominal gross national income per capita at purchasing power parity. To give you an idea, this is the distribution of percentage differences between national per capita incomes and EU per capita income in 2021:
And you won't be surprised to find that the luckiest country is Luxembourg, and the least fortunate is Bulgaria (look at that!). Please note: these data refer to 2021, the start year of the current budget planning cycle (2021-2027), so they are not the ones used to allocate the 2021-2027 budget (previous data were used for that purpose). However, the ranking of European countries by per capita income is relatively stable and evolves slowly, so let's keep these data as a useful reference.
I went to the well-known website to download credits from and contributions to the community budget in 2024, and the result is this:
In 2024, the largest of the rich countries (Germany) gave us 15 billion, France 5, we 3 (highlighted in blue), and so on, up to Greece, which received 3, and Belgium, which received 7. And here you may ask: wasn't the poorest country Bulgaria (highlighted in red)? Yes, but Belgium is the home of most of the provident and astute European institutions, which constantly watch over our interests at the modest cost of 7 billion a year!
It's easier to understand how it works if we express these contributions in relation to the nominal GDP of individual countries. It looks something like this:
And in this ranking, which is not affected by the size of the country, we are no longer third (as in the ranking of absolute contributions, that is, in millions of euros), but actually ninth among taxpayers, which makes sense, because in Denmark or Holland the per capita income is higher than ours (but since they are small, their contribution in absolute terms is lower than ours).
While the sum of net contributions in absolute terms is zero (not exactly, but I'm not getting into these difficulties), for the simple reason that if someone takes (plus sign) it's because someone has given (minus sign), and in algebraic sum these values can only cancel out, the sum of contributions in relation to GDP doesn't necessarily have to be zero, and we don't expect it to be: in fact, it's more likely to be positive. Indeed, given that large countries are above average in income, and very small countries are below average, we expect that in large countries the contribution to a budget that overall accounts for about 1% of total GDP will be fractions of a decimal point (and in fact, it doesn't even reach 0.5% of GDP in Germany), while in small countries the sums received will have a greater impact. Indeed, in Slovakia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Estonia, and Lithuania they exceed 1% of GDP, while in Latvia they reach 2.5% of GDP. Have I forgotten anything? Yes, I forgot the headquarters of the prestigious institutions: Belgium (+1.1% of GDP in 2024) and Luxembourg (+2.8% of GDP, also in 2024).
Paradoxically (but up to a certain point) those most interested in being pro-European are therefore two "rich" countries (considering that they are also rich because they host the well-known parasitic dome).
The inverse relationship between the gap in income from the average and the amount of net credits compared to GDP is quite clear in the data:
where Luxembourg, in the top right, is definitely what statistically would call an outlier , that is, a point that "stands outside" the represented data cloud. Obviously, there is dispersion because the criteria for allocating funds are more complex than that and also take into account other variables, such as (as already mentioned) the reference gross domestic product (GDP) is not the one I used for illustrative purposes, etc. But the meaning is clear enough: those on the left (i.e., below the European income average) tend to be at the top (i.e., to be net recipients of funds, to have positive net credits). The opposite is true for those on the right.
Good: I hope now it's clearer to everyone how it works.
Tomorrow… I'll explain it to those over there too!
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2026/01/chi-ha-dato-e-chi-ha-avuto-ancora-su.html on Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:57:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.