Acta Universitatis Danubius. Œconomica, Vol 10, No 5 (2014)

Abstract

The state budget is a financial plan at the macroeconomic level, and it is designed as a set of accounts of the nation, which reflects the current year and next year projections on all economic agents in the country / region. The size of the public sector varies significantly from one Member State to another, which means that the financial resources available to the public sector differ substantially at the European Union level. The paper includes an analysis of the evolution of the main indicators corresponding to public financial resources at EU level achieved between January 2009 - December 2012 or December 2013, where data processing was available. The information was taken from the Eurostat statistics database. The research methodology used in this work was done by the use of indicators: the share of total public revenue in GDP; the share of taxes in GDP of production and imports; the share of current taxes on income, wealth etc. in GDP; the share of social security contributions in GDP. In the analysis there were considered, of the total financial resources of government, only the taxes levied on production and imports, current taxes on income, wealth etc. and social security contributions. In conclusion, the share of government revenues in GDP increases, but there are states where it decreases, such as Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Germany and Sweden. The public financial resources share in GDP at the level of the Eurozone was always higher in relation to the entire European Union, but always keeping the difference around 0.8 to 0.9 percentage points. France recorded the highest share of social security contributions in GDP (18.8% in 2009 and 19.4% in 2013) while Denmark has the lowest share of these financial resources in GDP, i.e. only 1.9% in 2009 and 1.8% in 2013.