We develop a composite index to measure regional progress in meeting objectives set forth by the Europe 2020 strategy. Performance along the thematic areas of the Europe 2020 strategy was computed via an appropriately normalized shortfall measure. The final composite scores were calculated by assigning equal weight to each dimension of the index and taking their arithmetic average.
While we should be mindful not to overstate the reach of this analysis, a few general patterns are worth noting. First, we see that southern and central European countries such as Spain, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Romania fall behind Scandinavian and other northern European countries, despite the latters’ more ambitious targets. Second, our analysis makes plain the significant inter-regional heterogeneity of Europe 2020 performance for many countries. The cases of Spain and Italy are particularly suggestive in this regard.
We investigated the robustness of index ranks via a rigorous uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. While the ranks of a handful of regions were sensitive to changes in weights and aggregation, index ranks as a whole were quite robustJRC.DDG.01-Econometrics and applied statistic
