• The report “Business Over People. A critical analysis of public financing for COVID-19 and cost of living crisis responses in France, Spain and Belgium”, by the European Network of Corporate Observatories (ENCO), examines a total of 456 billion of public funding spent during 2020, 2021 and 2022.
• In a context of multiple crisis, socially necessary sectors such as health care, education and public transport received a small percentage of funding to face the crisis. Between 2020 and 2022, France allocated 17%, Belgium 9% and Spain only 7% of all crisis funds.
• These countries dedicated between a third and half of crisis funding to private companies.

In the face of the European elections, it is necessary to evaluate what has been done to tackle the current multicrisis, aggravated by the pandemic and the cost of living crisis, and worsened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The report “Business over people. A critical analysis of public financing for COVID-19 and cost of living crisis responses in France, Spain and Belgium” provides a detailed overview of public crisis financing (amounting to 456 billion euro) and shows that the French, Spanish and Belgium governments neither prioritized socially necessary services during the time studied, or put people’s and planetary well-being at the center of their public crisis financing. 

Socially necessary sectors such as health care, education and public transport received less than 17% of public financing. Few measures were targeted at supporting people in more vulnerable conditions (women doing unpaid care work, young people and the elderly, migrants, workers in unregulated or informal jobs...). In addition, during the period of suspension of the European fiscal rules, the governments did not commit to public spending to strengthen public sectors to guarantee collective rights.

On the other hand, between a third and half of the funding was allocated to private companies. If indirect grants are also accounted for, such as job protection measures or household energy subsidies, they received 69% (France), 68% (Spain) and 58% (Belgium) of public financing. As a result, the main beneficiary of the crisis measures was the private sector —through subsidies, favorable loans, fiscal leverages and public guarantees—, but also benefiting from indirect support —receiving billions of public money to maintain its workforce. Furthermore, these funds barely required to comply with climate or gender criteria.

"Crisis financing must be based on ecological, just, and feminist criteria and aimed at guaranteeing collective rights over market interests. The tendencies shown in the report suggest a reasonable matter of concern about public spending in the future. This is specially so in the threat of a more ring-wing EU Parliament and in a moment of new EU fiscal rules and member-state cutbacks to reduce their public debt and deficit", say the authors of the report.