Brussels, 21/04/2005 (Agence Europe) - The latest version of the score board on State aid in 2003, which was published by the Commission on Wednesday, shows a redirection of aid towards cross-cutting objectives (environment and energy saving, development, regional development, research and development and SMEs), rather than towards particular companies. The European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes, welcomed this trend, but confessed herself “disappointed to note that the overall level of aid in GDP terms did not fall in line with commitments taken in 2001 (…) at the Stockholm European Council”. The Commission is to publish an updated score board in the autumn to take account of figures from the new Member States. An initial version including them put at 7.8 billion EUR public subsidies granted in 2003 (EUROPE 8829).
In 2003, the overall level of aid paid out within the EU of 15 is estimated at 53 billion EUR, a slight increase on the 49 billion recorded in 2002. As in 2002, in 2003 Germany (16 billion EUR), France (9 billion) and Italy (7 billion) are still at the top of the list. The total sum represents 0.40% of the GDP of the EU of 15, but the breakdown per Member State confirms the disparities, as the percentage goes from 0.20% in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to 0.68% in Germany and 0.96% in Portugal. Almost 32 billion EUR was granted to the manufacturing and services sectors, 14 billion to agriculture and fisheries, a bit over 5 billion to the coal industry and just over 1 billion to transport (not including railways), according to the Commission.
In 2003, the share of cross-cutting aid represented 79% of the total (not including agriculture, fisheries and transport) and the remaining 21% went into sectorial aid, mainly the coal industry, and to rescue and restructuring aid to struggling companies. The Commission notes, however, that the artificially low level of sectorial aid is due mainly to the difficulty of quantifying unlimited State guarantees (granted to Electricité de France (EDF), for example, and to Germany regional public banks).
The Commission also observes that in 2004, it authorised the granting of State aid in 93% of its 566 final decisions. Furthermore, at the end of 2004, 4.6 billion EUR in illegal aid had not yet been recovered: 21 decisions adopted before 2000 had not been executed by the end of 2004 and out of 91 refund decisions taken between 2000 and 2004, 70 had not yet been carried out. For this period, 90% of the sums to be recovered related to Germany, Spain, Italy and France (see http: //europa.eu.int/comm/competition/state-aid/scoreboard/index_en.html).