Options for a stronger and more agile EU budget

The EU budget has to reconcile certainty in generating funding for what are, predominantly, multi-annual investment programmes, with a capacity to generate funding on a sufficient scale when circumstances and priorities change. Off-budget mechanisms have largely been preferred for dealing with the latter. This study presents recommendations, drawing on several scenarios, for how the EU budget could be recast to enable it to be more agile and responsive in dealing with new and future challenges requiring EU-level expenditure or lending.