Eurostat, soft law and the measurement of public debt : the case of public-private partnerships

Abstract

Budget stability seems to be mainly regulated through hard law, but in order to measure public debt, Eurostat has had to complement many aspects with informal instruments such as decisions in press releases, manuals, recommendations or decisions on particular cases contained in letters to the national statistical authorities. The aim of this paper is to analyse the legal status of these instruments and to comment on their main limitations. In order to do this, we will focus on the case of public-private partnerships, which have frequently been criticised for being used to hide public debt and whose accounting treatment on or off the government’s balance sheet depends mainly on the criteria published by Eurostat.