Social Inclusion in the EU Since the Enlargement: Progress or Regress?

Abstract

This paper measures and monitors EU Member States’ change in social inclusion using a set of statistical indicators as commonly endorsed by the Heads of State and Government in the Europe2020-program and employed by Social OMC. In particular, for each EU Member State a composite policy performance index is constructed using Van Puyenbroeck and Rogge (Eur J Oper Res, 2017) ‘indirect’ geometric benefit-of-the-doubt-method. Using their multi-factor decomposition, changes in social inclusion in the global EU-region and the individual EU Member States during the period 2005–2014 are analyzed and explained. Results showed that old EU Member States generally outperformed new EU Member States in social inclusion in both 2005 and 2014. In addition, results pointed out a general trend of increase in progress and cohesion in the EU. However, whereas the increase in social progress and social cohesion in the EU was more outspoken in the pre-crisis period, this increase was only small and more dispersed across EU Member States in the post-crisis period.