The relation between the Europe 2020 index and countries'competitiveness

Abstract

In 2010 the European Union adopted the Europe 2020 Strategy, a ten-year plan which aimed to deliver smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. These three pillars were organised into five targets focused on employment, the reduction of poverty and social exclusion, education, research and development (R&D), climate change and energy sustainability. These targets were not only defined for the European Union as a whole. Each Member States had its own national targets agreed on based on the current economic and social situations and on its potential achievements. Furter, data about the results of the different regions within the countries are available which allows to investigate how conditions and performances can vary even within the same nation. This thesis presents an analysis of the achievements relative to the Europe 2020 Strategy reached by Member States by comparing the performances of Member States with high and with low Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) as of 2010, the year of the inception of the Strategy. In order to do this, we apply a decomposition of the composite indexes as proposed by Walheer (2018). Applying composite indexes alone can generate confusion about real reasons of the results obtained. Thanks to the decomposed indexes, which are country-, group-, and objective-specific indexes, we can instead identify the causes of better and worse performances of the countries towards their Europe 2020 targets. The decision to base the countries’ classification on the GCI is due to the fact that this index is an assessment of countries’ competitiveness. Building a more competitive Europe is indeed the overall aim of the Europe 2020. Furthermore, we choose to focus on one Member State, Italy, to measure its progresses toward the targets of the Europe 2020 at the regional level. The analysis is carried out with the decomposition of the composite indexes applied to EU countries as seen in Walheer (2018). It is interesting to investigate the differences in the results of North-Centre regions and the so-called Mezzogiorno, which includes the regions of Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Sardinia and Sicily, because of the competitiveness disparity between these two areas that has characterised Italy since of its creation as a nation and that no policies or reforms have been able to lessen significantly. Therefore, our research questions are the following: 1.What are the performances of high and low GCI EU Members States towards achieving the Europe 2020 Strategy objectives?2.Is the competitiveness gap between North-Centre and Mezzogiorno regions of Italy reflected in different Europe 2020 Strategy performances?