Monitoring Convergence in the European Union with the convergEU Package for R

Abstract

Upward convergence, that is an improvement of Members States’ economic and social indicators’ performance, is a core policy target of the European Union. This concept is embodied in the European Pillar of social rights (EPSR) proclaimed by EU leaders in 2017. In 2018 Eurofound has developed a methodology to measure convergence, which has been implemented in the convergEU R package described in this work (rel. 0.5.0). The package extends the original STATA toolbox developed by Eurofound beyond the calculations of the four main measures of convergence as it provides functions to download, filter, impute, smooth indicators. Country and indicator fiches are automatically prepared and compiled in HTML format. Graphical output includes qualitative patterns of change along time to emphasize the key behaviour of an indicator with respect to the average of an aggregation of Member States. Besides EU Member States, the analysis of other collections of regions is supported for general indicators if context information is provided. A user-friendly, no coding required, shiny-based web application provides policy makers with a tool to produce convergence reports on selected indicators and countries.