In the context of the extraordinary meeting of the European Council which will discuss the EU’s long-term budget, event to be held on February 20, Digital Europe, the confederation that brings together IT associations in Europe, calls on the European leaders to increase the budget allocated to digitization from 3% to 10%. In this regard, ANIS, the Employers’ Association of the Software and Services Industry, part of Digital Europe, sent a request to the President Klaus Iohannis, the representative of Romania at the meeting, to put on the negotiation agenda the mentioned initiative. The approach is supported by all 24 digital associations of Digital Europe and has been proposed to every negotiator of the Member States.

Currently, the budget proposed by the European Commission for the Digital Europe program is 9.2 billion euros, respectively a share of 3% of the EU budget. According to Digital Europe, the Commission’s proposal represents an insufficient percentage granted to digitization, compared to other expenses assumed from the budget, and the component associations come to the European leaders with the following requests:

• increasing the EU budget for digital transformation by up to 10%;
• significant expansion of the Digital Europe program – from 9.2 billion euros to 25 billion euros – to maximize the short and medium term impact on the digital competences of citizens, SMEs and AI development at EU level;
• integrating digitization into the Horizon Europe research framework program;
• the allocation of specific expenses for digital innovation from other funding programs, such as the common agricultural policy or the cohesion policy;
• increasing the general R&D budget from 2% to 3% of EU GDP