For example, to date, only a quarter of the commitment appropriations has been paid out.

No changes can therefore be made to commitment appropriations.

The three institutions’ proposals for commitment appropriations differ only very slightly.

In the case of commitment appropriations, there is an increase of just under 3% compared to 2008.

The commitment appropriations that you regretted were cut do not fall under heading 2 for which we are responsible.

So there is still an upward trend, because commitment appropriations are continuing to rise.

At the level of the financial perspectives this concerns in particular the commitment appropriations for structural funds.

The commitment appropriations must be matched to the Commission's capacity for implementing them.

First, in heading 1a, commitment appropriations are adjusted as follows:

For these the Council has kept the Commission' s figure for commitment appropriations.

This was a clear improvement as compared with the previous year, when the implementation rate for commitment appropriations was 82%.

In its preliminary draft budget, the Commission notes an increase of 6.4 % in commitment appropriations over 1998.

I should stress that the time lag between overall commitment appropriations and their conversion to specific projects is a feature of many Union programmes.

However, first we must draw a distinction between commitment appropriations and payment appropriations.

The transfer of Structural Fund commitment appropriations now under consideration is already the third in this programme period.

With regard to subheading 1b, the Council adopted the commitment appropriations in the preliminary draft budget.

The Council has decided to reduce both the commitment appropriations and payment appropriations for internal policies.

In terms of appropriations which concern commitment appropriations, Budget 2000 is lower than the budget 1999.

In fact it means that a strict relationship should be preserved between commitment appropriations and payment appropriations.

That is why we provide for an overall increase in commitment appropriations of 20.8% for the Structural Funds.

Nevertheless, I should like to emphasise that, in this context, the increase in commitment appropriations is quite considerable for priority programmes.

So the evaluation of the likely implementation of the appropriations has been taken into account for commitment appropriations.

This has led to a marked increase in the budget, with more than EUR 112 billion in commitment appropriations.

Moving on now to heading 7, the pre-accession strategy, the Council accepted the commitment appropriations proposed by the Commission.

The commitment appropriations under subheading 1a have barely been cut, as the Council believes that competitiveness and responding to global challenges is very important.