Abstract
Providing a reliable indicator of the progress of the European countries towards the achievement of the Europe 2020 objectives is crucial for policy makers. Recently, a composite index was suggested for this task. In this paper, we propose a decomposition of this composite index by distinguishing between three different components: country-, group-, and objective-specific indexes. The decomposition, while simple and consistent with previous works, allows us to better quantify, measure, and monitor the progress of the European countries towards the achievement of the Europe 2020 objectives. Our findings suggest that significant efforts are still required to reach the Europe 2020 objectives. The decomposition highlights important patterns for the three levels for each country.
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Notes
See, for example, Freudenberg (2003) for extensive discussion.
The normalised indicators for each country j at time t for objective i, denoted by \( NX _{j,i}^t\), are defined as follows:
$$\begin{aligned} NX _{j,i}^t&=\frac{X_{j,i}^t-X_{m,i}}{X_{M,i}-X_{m,i}}, \text { for\,a\,positive\,target.}\qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad (1) \end{aligned}$$$$\begin{aligned} NX _{j,i}^t&=\frac{X_{M,i}-X_{j,i}^t}{X_{M,i}-X_{m,i}}, \text { for\,a\,negative\,target.}\qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad (2) \end{aligned}$$\( NX _{j,i}^t\) is bounded from below by zero and from above by one. If \( NX _{j,i}^t=1\), it means that country j at time t has the best performance on objective i. Lower values indicate worse performances.
In particular, Tertiary education is measured as the percentage of people, for the age group 30–34, that have successfully completed university or university-like education (availability: 2003–2015); R&D is measured as the ratio of the expenditure of R&D over GDP (availability: 2003–2015); Greenhouse gas emissions is given as an index taking 1990 as the base year (availability: 1990–2015); Renewable energy is measured as the share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption (availability: 2004–2015); Energy efficiency is measured as the gross inland consumption of energy divided by GDP (availability: 2000–2015); Employment is measured as the rate of employment in the age group 20–64 (availability: 2001–2015); Early school leavers are measured as the percentage of the population aged 18–24 with, at most, lower secondary education and not in further education or training (availability: 2000–2015); and Poverty is measured by the people at risk of poverty or social exclusion (availability 2004–2015). Also, for some years and countries, there could have been a break in the estimation, low reliability issue, or difference in the definition. Hopefully, these issues are rather marginal, overall making the data good quality. When these cases occur, we recompute the composite indexes and their decomposition using two different strategies: linear regression and simple average. This has no important impact on the results, and on our main conclusions. As such, the results displayed in Sect. 3.2 are those using the data taken from Eurostat.
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We thank the Editor in Chief Filomena Maggino and two anonymous referees for their comments that substantially improved the paper.
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Appendix
See Tables 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14.
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Walheer, B. Decomposing the Europe 2020 Index. Soc Indic Res 140, 875–905 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1797-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1797-8