Amending budget 4/2003: general statement of revenue

PURPOSE : to present the preliminary draft amending budget 4/2003 to the budget for 2003 - General statement of revenue : a technical update of the Member States' contributions to the EU budget in 2003. CONTENT : the Commission is proposing to revise the financing of the budget on the basis of more recent economic forecasts. The result is a repartition of the national contributions to the EU budget different from what was initially budgeted and different from the previous amending budget 3/2003 (refer to BUD/2003/2103). The changes concern in particular : - the lower than expected growth in 2002 as well as lower forecast economic growth for 2003 as compared to last year's budgetary forecast, the forecasts of Customs duties, VAT bases and GNI bases are all revised downwards: - updating the correction of budgetary imbalances in favour of the United Kingdom for the year 2002. Finally, this amending budget covers the repayment of the surplus from the Guarantee Fund for external measures for 2002, and other minor items, resulting in an increase by EUR 263 million of the total revenue, and a corresponding decrease of the amounts to be collected from the Member States. A summary table shows the distribution of own resources between Member States as budgeted in Budget 2003, as affected by the Preliminary Draft Amending Budget No 3/2003 and as affected by the Preliminary Draft Budget No 4/2003. This table shows that there is a difference of more than EUR 6,666 billion between the 2003 budget as it was adopted at the end of budgetary procedure and preliminary draft amending budget 4/2003.�