The statistical treatment of PPPs matters to many governments. They see PPP as a solution to initiate new infrastructure investment without affecting their financial stability and their debt ratios, as they pass a majority of risk for the provision, operation and maintenance of the new asset to the private sector. In general, Eurostat's rules foresee that any PPP, which receives public contributions of more than 50%, has to be reported on the Government's balance sheet. In this, grants are treated as public contributions and as the aggregate of EU grants and national contributions has exceeded 50% for most past projects, they should have all been reported on the public balance sheet (and the associated debt counted towards the Excessive Deficit Procedure). Yet, this does not seem to be in the spirit of the Maastricht stability rules as an EU grant would not have a negative effect on the financial stability of the state in which the PPP is procured. A more appropriate approach would be to treat the EU grant as neutral and only to apply the risk distribution test to the costs that the private partner bears and the support that the project receives from the procuring authority.