EU Budget 2006: Improvement in quality of EU spending is confirmed

The "EU Budget 2006 Financial Report", released yesterday, confirms some positive trends in EU resources allocation: an almost 70% increase in spending on Competitiveness for Growth and Employment and further improvements in monitoring and planning keep execution rate at historically high level. Execution rate of structural funds was particularly high in some countries, such as Ireland (90%), Austria (86%) and Portugal (82%), demonstrating both better planning and monitoring by the Commission's services and better delivering capacities by the managing authorities and their partners.

Full report here.
Press release here.
Slides presentation of the Report here.
Detailed data 2000-2007 here (xls).