EU countries’ progress towards ‘Europe 2020 strategy targets’

Abstract

This paper describes and analyzes EU Member States’ progress towards the national EU2020 targets. To do so, this paper constructs a geometric composite index with Benefit-of-the-Doubt weights as a measure of a Member State’s overall performance on the EU2020 headline indicators. A tripartite decomposition of Member State performance change is presented to explain and analyze performance change of the EU-region and the individual EU Member States during the period 2008–2014. The results reveal that all Member States are in general making progress towards their national targets. Member States generally moved forward in the areas of R&D, environmental and educational policy and moved backwards in terms of employment and poverty and social inclusion. As to the realization of the national targets, the majority of the Member States are still mostly lagging on R&D and social inclusion and poverty reduction.