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An Assessment of EU 2020 Strategy: Too Far to Reach?

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Abstract

In 2010, EU adopted a new growth strategy which includes three growth priorities and five headline targets to be reached by 2020. The aim of this paper is to investigate the current performance of the EU member and candidate states in achieving these growth priorities and the overall strategy target by allocating the headline targets into the priorities and the priorities into the strategy by the use of a composite indicator methodology. The paper determines how far away each member and candidate state is from the targeted levels of the priorities and the strategy by making a distinction between EU 15 and relatively new member states as well. The developed composite indices enable the observation of the performances of the member and candidate states in a single indicator for the overall strategy and each growth priority. The results of the strategy index and three growth priority indices show that Nordic states possess the highest index scores already having reached many of the targets; many new member states performed as good as EU 15 and some EU 15 states are placed at the bottom of the ranking with quite poor performance in reaching the EU 2020 strategy.

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Notes

  1. In summarizing these weaknesses, the European Commission (2010) refers to Europe's structurally lower average growth rates and significantly lower employment rates (with fewer average working hours) than its main economic partners, US and Japan; widening productivity gap with the main economic partners, due to lower investment in R&D and innovation; accelerating demographic ageing, strong dependence on fossil fuels such as oil and inefficient use of raw materials in Europe.

  2. The European Commission proposed the strategy package on 3 March 2010 and it was adopted by the European Council in the same month, but the specific target levels were approved in June 2010.

  3. The main head-line targets of the Lisbon are achieving 3% annual GDP growth, 3% share of R&D expenditure in GDP, 70% employment rate (60 and 50% for women and elderly, respectively) and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% till 2010.

  4. The report by Wim Kok prepared for the Commission to review the midterm performance of the Lisbon Agenda declared that the targets were too ambitious to reach, the political will to satisfy the Lisbon objectives was not sufficient and the slow policy actions did not push economic growth. For these reasons, further growth and job oriented targets were adopted and targets were moderated by the Council (2005).

  5. These objectives were initially defined in the “Energy and Climate Package” which was proposed by European Commission to the Council in January 2008. In December 2008, European Council adopted and EU Parliament endorsed this package and the objectives (European Council 2008).

  6. According to December 2009 European Council conclusions, for the period beyond 2012 till 2020, the EU plans to increase this 20% reduction target to 30%, on condition that other countries commit themselves to satisfying emission reductions (European Commission 2010, p. 9).

  7. Increasing energy efficiency means reducing energy intensity, which is the amount of energy consumed to produce per unit of GDP.

  8. People at risk of poverty are the people having an income level below 60% of the median disposable income (national poverty line) in each member state.

  9. See (Aristovnik and Pungartnik 2009; Gelauff and Lejour 2006; and Johansson et al. 2007), for the quantitative analysis of reaching Lisbon targets.

  10. The HDI is a weighted average of three indices; Education index, Life expectancy index and GDP index. Each index measures one or more dimensions. Education index stands for the knowledge level and measures the achievements in a country in the dimensions of adult literacy rate, and combined primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment ratios. Life expectancy index shows the value of the dimension of life expectancy at birth and GDP index is the measure of the dimension of decent standard of living. Performance on these dimensions is calculated by using the normalization formula:

    $$ {\text{Dimension index}} = \frac{{{\text{Actual value}} - {\text{Minimum value}}}}{{{\text{Maximum value}} - {\text{Minimum value}}}} $$

    Actual value indicates the score of the country on the dimension in the given year. Minimum value is the lowest value among countries and maximum value is the highest value achieved on that dimension among all the values in the data set. The main reason for using this formula is to acquire index scores between 0 and 1, where the country possessing minimum value gets 0 and the one possessing maximum value gets 1 index score. After calculating each dimension index, the equally-weighted averages of these indices are calculated and the final score is HDI (UNDP 2008, pp. 3–4).

  11. The min–max normalization method is also used in studies such as preparing a gender-related development index (UNDP 2008), a gender equality index for European Union (Plantenga et al. 2009) and a relative status of women index (Dijkstra and Hanmer 2000).

  12. Nordic states are Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

  13. On average 70 percent of Iceland’s energy consumption was supplied by renewable sources.

  14. Taking the 1990 baseline emission level as 100, in Latvia, the level was around 40 in 2000s. In 10 years, almost 60 percent emission reduction is obtained.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Middle East Technical University, Office: A06, Ankara, Turkey

    Aylin Ege

  2. Department of Economics, Middle East Technical University, Office: F110, Ankara, Turkey

    Mehmet Selman Çolak

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  1. Mehmet Selman Çolak
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  2. Aylin Ege
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Correspondence to Mehmet Selman Çolak.

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Çolak, M.S., Ege, A. An Assessment of EU 2020 Strategy: Too Far to Reach?. Soc Indic Res 110, 659–680 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9950-2

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