EN
Following months of bickering, the EU finally reached an agreement on its 2014-2020 budget on February 8. While the deal sees the bloc's spending drop for the first time ever, the CEE members who led the fight against the cuts managed to protect much of their precious development funding. Despite the smaller overall pot, Poland will actually collect more funding over the next seven years, receiving a total of 105.8bn euro - 72bn euro in cohesion funds and 28.5bn euro under Common Agriculture Policy. Poland received 102bn euro for the 2007-2013 period. Warsaw is pushing to continue the rapid development of infrastructure that started ahead of the Euro 2012 football championships, and has earmarked a new infrastructure fund as its flagship to help stimulate an economy slowing worryingly. From 2020, Poland is expected to be a net payer to the EU budget - and not its largest recipient, as it is now - after its economy catches up with EU peers.