How Have Spending Reviews Recently Evolved Through EU Initiatives?

A spending review is a budgetary instrument that allows national authorities to improve the quality of their public spending. It helps in promoting the re-prioritisation of public expenditure and assessing whether existing expenditure items are still efficient and in line with new policy priorities. Despite the existence of a set of Common Principles on expenditure allocation, spending reviews are not always fully optimised or linked to national budget discussions. Therefore, the European Commission guides and assists Member States in the conduct of spending reviews through the Country-Specific Recommendations, as well as through two other prominent EU initiatives: the Technical Support Instrument and the Recovery and Resilience Facility. This paper provides an overview of the new elements in the reviews conducted in these contexts. The findings show that there are improvements, inter alia, in terms of the scope of the reviews, the steering done during the process and the implementation of results in budgets. This indicates that the recent spending reviews are now more aligned with the Common Principles on expenditure allocation and that governance and transparency have improved. However, there is still further room for improvement, for example in linking review results to (multi-)annual budgets.