Bart De Wever, the mayor of the Belgian city of Antwerp and chairman of the Flemish right-wing political party N-VA, claimed that “Belgium has the highest public expenditure and the highest structural deficit of the EU.” EUfactcheck looked into this claim and the source it was based on, and found out that the statement made by De Wever is false.
There are three claims stated in the tweet that De Wever posted on Twitter on the 11th of October: “Belgium has the highest public expenditure, the highest tax revenue and the highest structural deficit of the EU. The federal government is making sure with this pseudo-budget that we will score these three questionable prices with flying colors even more. Completely irresponsible.” EUfactcheck investigated all three statements.
Screenshot from Twitter by Marlies Geyskens
Public expenditure
The first claim in his tweet states that ‘Belgium has the highest public expenditure of all EU countries’. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, public expenditure means all the expenses made by a government. They use these expenses to provide things like public services, or infrastructure.
The relative size of the public expenditure is presented by the statistical office of the European Union Eurostat as a proportion (percentage) of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The GDP measures the value of all goods and services that are being produced in a country, in a given period of time. Therefore the relative size of public expenditure is a measure of the importance of the state as an economic actor in an economy.
Jules Cremers, a press and communication employee of De Wever, provided EUfactcheck with the figures and data on which De Wever built his first Twitter claim. These figures and data are based on a report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since no concrete year was stated on which De Wever based his Twitter claim, EUfactcheck looked at the most recent data from the full year of 2021.
In concrete terms: In 2021, France ranked the highest in the list of total general government expenditures with 59%. Belgium is placed fourth with 55.5%, preceded by Austria (56%) and Greece (57.4%). Previous figures also match with data EUfactcheck found in another report of Eurostat from 2021. All this data combined debunks the first claim made by De Wever. After prospecting all the information, EUfactcheck concluded that the data didn’t collide in comparison with the first claim that was made.
Tax revenue
The second claim made by De Wever stated that “Belgium has the highest tax revenue of the EU.” Tax revenue is the total amount collected from taxes on income in comparison to Gross Domestic Product. According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 2021, Belgium ranked at number seven in a list of 22 EU-countries with 42 %.
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© OECD
Therefore, EUfactcheck concludes that the second statement made by De Wever is also false.
Structural deficit
The third claim in De Wever’s tweet stated that “Belgium has the highest structural deficit of all EU countries.” This claim is also false when based on the most recent data from 2021.
According to the OECD iLibrary, the structural deficit is used to check the long-term sustainability of a government’s financial situation. It is the budget deficit which a government would have with its current policies if the economy was operating at its full potential, so “potential GDP”.
From the data De Wever’s cabinet provided EUfactcheck, which is again based on a report of the IMF from April 2022, Belgium does not have the highest structural deficit of the EU in 2021. Also other data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which EUfactcheck consulted, confirm that in the year of 2021 Belgium did not have the highest structural deficit. EUfactcheck concluded that also the third claim made by De Wever is false.
Fair hearing
But De Wever’s administration explained to EUfactcheck that he based his claim on the IMF report’s figures between 2024 and 2027, as previously explained in the text. When EUfactcheck looked at these data from 2027, Belgium indeed has the highest public expenditure and structural deficit of the EU.
But according to Wim Moesen, an economist and emeritus professor of public economy at the Catholic University of Leuven, structural deficit is mostly speculation. “Belgium is indeed not doing well with governmental expenditure and structural deficit. But, the figures for 2027 are all in the future and therefore speculation. It is a calculation outside of the official national accountancy of a government. There is no consensus on how to calculate the structural deficit, so different results can be acquired. Therefore, I always say to stick to factual statistics, since the speculative structural deficit is a difficult number to use in an argument,” says Moesen.
“It is very possible that these figures still change in time. There are many parameters which influence the calculation of the structural deficit and they provide the government with a speculation on how the structural deficit can (or won’t) evolve if certain parameters stay the same. If you look at the latest available and factual figures of 2021, the claim by De Wever is clearly incorrect, because you just can’t make a concrete statement based on speculation.”
De Wever does not mention in his tweet that his claim is based on a prediction. Even stronger: it is clear from his wording that he is talking about the present, since he uses the words ‘even more’. “The federal government is making sure with this pseudo-budget that we will score these three questionable prices with flying colors even more”.
Conclusion
After verification, EUfactcheck concludes that the quote given by politician De Wever that “Belgium has the highest public expenditure, the highest tax revenue and the highest structural deficit of the EU”, is false.
RESEARCH | ARTICLE © Maya Teugels, Nomi Princen, and Marlies Geyskens, (International) Journalism, Thomas More University of Mechelen, Belgium and Hogeschool Utrecht, The Netherlands.
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