Abstract
The growth strategy of Europe 2020 includes standards to be achieved by the EU member states in many crucial areas, such as in employment, innovation, education, poverty, climate and energy policy. The progress is regularly measured by a set of predetermined indicators in each area. Although Eurostat annually publishes the values of these indicators on both national and cross-national levels, not many studies have been conducted on the methodology of how the progress can be quantified. In this paper we propose a new, more efficient complex index that measures how close the member states are to the completion of the strategy, also considering the heterogeneity of growth paces across the countries. A series of calculations (such as the Mahalanobis distance between the actual and the target values of the indicators and a special self-weighting average constructed to eliminate country-specific differences in development) that were based on the original indicators showed that the EU seemed to lag behind in fulfilling its goals that had been set for 2020 in 2008–2013. It can be empirically proven that a successful cohesion policy is essential in order to fulfill the growth expectations set for a decade.
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Notes
About the aims and methods for constructing and using composite indicators, see OECD (2008).
The study had been conducted before Croatia became an EU member.
Unfortunately, Eurostat data does not include the values of the energy efficiency index for the given time period as of this date; therefore, the Sustainable Growth index had to be calculated solely from the data on renewable energy index and emission index (with ½–½ weights). As energy consumption and social exclusion should be calculated for the EU as a whole, these variables were dropped from our analyses.
For a detailed description of each class, please refer to Eurostat (2014).
The same problem is the focal point of Acs et al. (2011), however, the topic at hand (competitiveness index) and the conclusions are different.
By the term “bias” we mean that the central tendency appears greater than the realistic expected value. The term “bias” is not used in its original statistical meaning.
As the greenhouse gas emissions variable hasn’t been broken down into national target levels in Europe 2020, we used unadjusted averages here and from here on.
The corresponding calculations can be performed using the unadjusted indicator values, as well.
It is easier to interpret the stochastic relationships by considering the correlation matrices than it is to consider covariances with little meaningfulness and incomparable dimensions, as opposed to the „benign” nature of linear correlation coefficients.
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Rappai, G. Europe En Route to 2020: A New Way of Evaluating the Overall Fulfillment of the Europe 2020 Strategic Goals. Soc Indic Res 129, 77–93 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1092-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1092-5