Journal of Competitiveness (Sep 2011)
The Position of the CR Among the EU States Based on Selected Measures of the Lisbon Strategy
Abstract
The Lisbon Strategy is a key document of the EU, which deals with the priorities and measures for the stimulation of economic, social and ecological renewal of member states in the period 2000-2010. There are more than 130 structural measures from the fields of national development, employment, research and innovations, economic reforms, social coherence and living environment, which can be used for the evaluation and quantification as well as the modernization of European economics and the improvement of its global competitiveness. The structural measures for international comparisons have been developed by Eurostat and they are used by the European Council as the basic data for the evaluation of the level of attainments of the goals of the Lisbon Strategy. In the last few years, a list of 15 key indicators has been developed. They are: GDP per head in parity of purchasing capacity, labour productivity in parity of purchasing capacity, employment rate, employment rate of women, employment rate of elderly people, number of persons with secondary school certificate from the ages between 20 and 24, science and research expenditures as a share of GDP, investments as a share of GDP, price level, exposure to poverty, level of long term unemployment, emission of glasshouse effect, energy consumption as a share of GDP, goods traffic as a share of GDP and regional dispersion of the unemployment rate. The goal of this paper is to propose some methodological approaches that are suitable for analyzing these indicators. The proposal for a correct methodology is highly complicated due to the miscellanea of the variables involved. The multiple dimensional statistical methods seem to be useful especially because of its ability to evaluate complex sets of variables.
