EU to mull changes to budget rules – debt, green investment in focus

EUROPEAN Union (EU) finance ministers will begin discussing today how to change their budget rules to deal with a huge rise in government debt during the coronavirus pandemic and how to encourage spending needed to arrest climate change.

Potential options include exempting “green” investments from calculations of deficit and debt limits and temporarily forgetting existing rules that say debt must be cut every year, documents prepared for the ministers’ talks showed.