How have the European Union countries approached the Europe 2020 targets?

Abstract

We consider the headline indicators of the Europe 2020 agenda for the European Union countries for several years of the period 2010–2019 and their own national targets for these indicators. The indicators belong to five thematic areas: employment; education; research, development, and innovation; poverty and social exclusion; climate change; and energy. The main objective of this article is to analyze the dynamics and evolution of the EU countries and the Agenda Europe 2020 indicators over the period, taking into account the relations between the indicators for the EU countries along the years. In order to analyze the different data tables, we have used a three-way data methodology, the STATIS methodology. The results obtained show that the countries of the European Union as a whole have made progress towards the global targets set for the different indicators, with some countries making more significant progress than others. The indicators related to research, development, and innovation, as well as climate change and energy, are the ones where the most improvement is needed. The targets set individually for each country, less demanding for some and more daring for others, were generally already achieved in 2019 or are very close to being achieved.

Keywords

• Europe 2020 strategy
• European Union countries
• principal component analysis
• STATIS methodology