After decades of liberalisation and retreat of the state, current crisis responses show a great role of the expenditure state. At the national level, COVID-19 has been fought with massive market intervention, procurement of medical equipment, and large-scale short-term working schemes. The EU has also increased its financial powers with the Recovery Fund and Next Generation EU. These new funds, with other EU off-budget funds and the regular budget, make up the EU's financial resources. Understanding if and how these resources are used is relevant as (re)distribution has increased and is here to stay. With this aim, this project focuses on the process that lies between negotiating resources in Brussels and their decentralised implementation in member states. How does the EU spend its money? 

The three aims of the project are to capture and assess how EU money is spent, explain spending processes and outcomes with competence-control (cc) arrangements, and theorise the effects of spending on the EU political system. Empirically, the project offers an analysis of social and industrial policies over four decades (1987-2027). Methodologically, it builds the first database on spending policy with indicators on the gap between allocation and disbursement (volume and targets) and institutional features of spending governance. It combines a quantitative analysis of spending patterns with an in-depth analysis of 16 cases, systematically selected to vary between social and industrial policy, over time, and in institutional features of spending governance. The results are expected to provide a comparative empirical and theoretical account of EU spending as a distinct phase between intergovernmental budget negotiations and decentralised implementation that highlights the role of control and its effect on the reconfiguration of the EU system when moving beyond the regulatory state (Majone 1993) towards an expenditure state (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2014).