This report follows from a project entitled “Regional Human Development” on request of the Directorate-General Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO) of the European Commission. The objective of the project was to develop indicators that are capable of measuring patterns and trends in human development across the regions of the EU member states. The main contribution of this report lies in a proposal for conceptualizing and measuring human development at the European regional level across multiple years using. The results of the EU-RHDI show a clear north-west/south-east divide across EU regions when it comes to the overall index. Within countries differences exist as to regional performance in human development. In general, capital city regions seem to outperform non-capital city regions within countries. This is readily seen across regions in eastern EU member states where the large intra-country differences in scores are largely driven by the capital city outperforming other regions by a length. Zooming in on the results of the individual dimensions, we find in general that the EU is especially characterized by a west/east divide. In health, southern regions are often outperforming northern regions. However, southern regions’ relative good performance in health contrasts sharply with their underperformance in income and especially knowledge.JRC.DDG.01 - Econometrics and applied statistic
