Dutch Finance Policy, orange sofa
Orange sofa © Şahin Sezer Dinçer

Dutch Finance — A Snapshot of Where the Money Goes

The Netherlands cut foreign aid 70%, then changed governments. Here is what is actually happening now.

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Dutch Finance — A Snapshot

Money tells a country’s real priorities faster than any policy speech. In the Netherlands, the SDGs page already showed one half of that story: a country with a low Spillover Score, rated red on Corporate Tax Haven status and on the volume of profits multinationals shift through its borders. This page goes further into that same money, where it comes from, where it disappears to, and who pays the price when a government decides to spend less of it on the rest of the world.

A New Government, Mid-Story

The Netherlands has a new cabinet, and the timing matters for everything below. The Jetten government, a minority coalition of D66, the VVD, and the CDA, was sworn in on 23 February 2026, ending the short, turbulent Schoof cabinet that collapsed the previous year over asylum policy. Rob Jetten, at 38, became the country’s youngest prime minister and its first openly gay one. He has called his administration a “cabinet of collaboration,” a deliberate signal after a coalition that governed by confrontation.

That earlier cabinet’s most consequential decision for RYB’s readers came from a minister who no longer holds office. Reinette Klever, then Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, announced in November 2024 that funding for civil society organisations would fall from roughly €1.4 billion over five years to between €390 and €565 million for 2026 to 2030, a cut of more than 70%. Klever had previously argued that all development assistance should end. The cut took effect broadly as announced; the new civil society framework for 2026 to 2030 landed at around €600 million, a reduction that reshaped Dutch development cooperation for years to come, regardless of which government followed.

What changed in February is the direction of travel, not yet the numbers themselves. The new coalition agreement, titled “Let’s Get to Work: Building a Better Netherlands,” commits to reinvesting in exactly the areas the Schoof cabinet cut hardest: humanitarian aid, climate, education, women’s rights, and civil society. The new Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, Sjoerd Sjoerdsma of D66, has already tested how difficult that promise is to keep in practice. In April 2026, he restored a previously agreed funding cut to UNRWA, the UN agency operating in the Palestinian territories, citing the new coalition agreement, only to apologise to parliament days later after right-wing opposition parties accused him of reversing a deal they had just voted to support. As a minority government holding only 66 of 150 seats, the Jetten cabinet cannot simply restore what the previous one cut. Every reversal has to be negotiated, vote by vote, with parties that may not agree.

Why This Matters to RYB

RYB’s work sits inside the categories these budgets touch most directly. Arts and culture programming, and the women’s organisations this network writes about on its Culture Women’s Day pages, are precisely the kind of civil society work that loses out first when a government decides aid should serve “Netherlands-first” priorities instead. RYB does not receive this funding and is not appealing for it here. What RYB can do is what it does elsewhere on this site: report plainly on a policy shift most of its own audience would otherwise never see, and connect it to the global development framework the rest of this network is built around.

The scale of the original cut is worth sitting with. A March 2025 UN Women survey of 411 women’s organisations across 44 crisis settings found that nearly half expected to close within six months due to funding cuts worldwide, of which the Dutch reduction was one significant part. WO=MEN, Europe’s largest gender platform, together with Mama Cash and Count Me In!, published an impact report documenting exactly how Dutch organisations and their partners abroad were affected. Even under the harshest version of the policy, certain themes kept funding: combating HIV/AIDS, ending female genital mutilation, women’s entrepreneurship, and support for human rights defenders facing acute danger. The lobbying capacity that let Dutch NGOs carry partner organisations’ concerns to negotiating tables in Brussels and Geneva did not survive the same way.

Where the Other Money Goes

The aid story is only half of Dutch finance. The other half is about money flowing in the opposite direction, into the Netherlands rather than out of it, and staying there for reasons that have little to do with Dutch economic activity.

The Netherlands ranks 7th on the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index, just behind Luxembourg and ahead of South Korea. RYB’s own Financial Secrecy page goes deeper into how that index is built and what it measures globally; on Dutch ground specifically, the pattern is concrete. The country’s extensive network of tax treaties, its participation exemption for dividends and capital gains, and a regime that can reduce the effective tax rate on patent income to as low as 7%, together make the Netherlands one of the most attractive jurisdictions in the world for multinational holding companies. The Dutch central bank’s own 2025 figures put cross-border direct investment positions at 436% of GDP inbound and 508% outbound, several thousand billion euros moving through structures the bank itself describes as often built for tax optimisation rather than operational business.

Independent researchers have quantified what this costs other countries. The Tax Justice Network identified the Netherlands as one of four European jurisdictions in an “axis of tax avoidance” costing EU member states an estimated $10 billion a year in lost corporate tax from US multinationals alone. A widely cited academic database tracking global profit shifting lists the Netherlands among the small group of countries, alongside Luxembourg, Ireland, and Switzerland, that book corporate profits in numbers disproportionate to the real economic activity happening there. None of this requires breaking any law. It is, by most independent accounts, exactly what Dutch tax policy was designed to do.

The Two Halves, Together

This is why a Spillover Score and an aid budget belong on the same page. A country can cut what it sends out to the world’s poorest civil society organisations while simultaneously hosting one of the largest concentrations of corporate tax avoidance on the planet, and both decisions can be entirely legal, debated openly in parliament, and defended as fiscally responsible. Whether that combination is good policy is a political question RYB leaves to its readers and to the Dutch electorate that will eventually judge it. That the combination exists, and that it is measurable, is not in dispute.

Looking Forward

The Netherlands’ finance story is mid-sentence right now, not finished. A government that promised collaboration is trying to rebuild parts of a development budget it did not originally cut, one contested vote at a time, while the country’s tax architecture remains largely untouched by the change in coalition. Whether the Jetten cabinet’s reinvestment commitments survive contact with a parliament where it holds fewer than half the seats is a question only the coming budget cycles will answer. RYB will keep tracking both halves of this page as they move, the aid going out and the profits coming in, because a snapshot only stays honest if it gets retaken.

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