Annual cost of the EP per inhabitant

The graphic above shows the annual running cost, divided by the number of inhabitants, for the European Parliament, German Bundestag, UK House of Commons, French Assemblée nationale, and US House of Representatives.1 Caution is inevitably needed in making comparisons between the costs of parliaments, as each has its own history, traditions and organisational form: budget allocations for a given purpose in one parliament may have no parallel in another, while very different levels of resources may be dedicated to apparently similar tasks. The EP budget, for example, includes the costs of translation and interpreting into and out of 24 languages, and of operating in three centres – Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg – whereas other parliaments do not have these dimensions to their work.