Brussels, 21/05/2008 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission's latest state aid scoreboard, published on Wednesday 21 May, shows that spending by member states on the environment has risen significantly over the last seven years. The Commission welcomes this trend, due partly to a rise in reductions or exemptions from environmental taxes, as wanted by the new guidelines adopted in January of this year (see EUROPE 9686).
Over the period of validity of the previous environmental aid guidelines (2001-2007), the scoreboard shows that the Commission took around 350 decisions. In 98% of cases, the Commission found the aid to be compatible, in many cases without an in-depth investigation. Although the number of new environmental aid measures remained stable for most member states since 2001, total expenditure for environmental purposes doubled between 2001 and 2006 from €7 to €14 billion. The countries which granted most aid, as a proportion of their GDP, between 2004 and 2006 were Sweden (0.77% of GDP), Denmark (0.35%) and Germany (0.32 %). It should be noted, however, that 53% of aid consists of exemptions from environmental taxes, for large, often highly polluting, industries, but the Commission considered that such aid brought indirect benefits to the environment.
The scoreboard also shows an improvement in the recovery of unlawful and incompatible aid: at the end of 2007, there were 49 pending recovery decisions compared to 93 at the end of 2004 and 60 at the end of 2006. The Commission notes, however, that four out of five notifications were incomplete and calls for improvement. Examination of a complete state aid case, on average, takes only 1.8 months, but requests for the additional information that is needed in most cases extends the average time taken for a preliminary examination to 5.2 months (compared with 6.4 previously). The press release also points to an increase in the number of aid measures being introduced without the end for notification, thanks to regulations covering exemptions for certain categories of aid: there were 1,100 such measures in 2007, compared with 410 in 2006. The Commission welcomes this development, which is having the desired effect in allowing it to devote more resources to scrutinising the aid measures most likely to create competition problems. The scoreboard is available at the following address: http: //ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/state_aid/studies_reports/studies_reports.html (C.D.)