Archive:Europe 2020 indicators - executive summary

Planned article update: July 2018.

This article is part of a set of statistical articles on the Europe 2020 strategy. It provides recent statistics on poverty and social inclusion in the European Union (EU).

Overview of trends in the Europe 2020 headline indicators

Table 1: Europe 2020 headline indicators, EU-28, 2008 and 2011-2016
Source: Eurostat (see dedicated section)

Nine headline indicators and additional sub-indicators support the monitoring of the Europe 2020 strategy’s eight targets. The development of these indicators since 2008, the baseline year for monitoring the Europe 2020 strategy, shows a rather mixed picture. Substantial progress has been made in the areas of climate change and energy, as well as in education. But there is still some way to go to meet targets on R&D investment, employment and poverty alleviation, although more recent developments for the latter two are promising.

The Europe 2020 strategy

Europe 2020 is the EU’s agenda for jobs and growth for the current decade. It emphasises smart, sustainable and inclusive growth as a way to strengthen the EU economy and prepare its structure for the challenges of the next decade. As a main objective, the strategy strives to deliver high levels of employment, productivity and social cohesion in the Member States, while reducing the impact on the natural environment.

To reach this objective, the EU has adopted eight ambitious targets in the areas of employment, research and development (R&D), climate change and energy, education and poverty reduction, to be reached by 2020. These have been translated into national targets to reflect the situation and possibilities of each Member State to contribute to the common goal. A set of nine headline indicators and additional sub-indicators provides an overview of how fast the EU is progressing towards its overall targets and how far it still has to go to reach them.

Since 2008, substantial progress has been made in the area of climate change and energy through reduced greenhouse gas emissions and increased use of renewable energy sources. Positive developments are also visible in the area of education, where the EU is within reaching distance of both headline targets. While the EU remains at a significant distance from its targets on R&D investment, employment and poverty alleviation, the most recent developments in the latter two areas are encouraging and the targets are still within reach for 2020.

The analysis in this 2017 edition of ‘Smarter, greener, more inclusive?’ aims to shed light on the trends in the headline indicators over the past seven years, from 2008 up to 2015 or 2016 (depending on data availability).

Employment rate

71.1 % of the EU population aged 20 to 64 were employed in 2016, up from 70.1 % in 2015. This is by far the highest share that has been observed since 2002. As a result, the distance to the Europe 2020 employment target of 75 % narrowed to 3.9 percentage points. Compared with other major economies in the world, the EU’s employment rate lags behind some countries such as Japan, the United States, Russia and China.

A considerably lower employment rate was observed for young people aged 20-29 than for those aged 30 to 54. The employment gap between these two cohorts has been increasing over the past years. Older people (aged 55 to 64 years) were another vulnerable group on the labour market. Although their employment rate has grown continuously over the past decade, it still remains low compared to younger age groups. The gender employment gap has narrowed for all age groups since 2002. In 2016, the largest gap was observed for the age group 30 to 34 (14.3 percentage points).

Other factors influencing integration into the labour market are educational attainment levels and country of origin. Just slightly more than half of those with at most primary or lower secondary education in the EU were employed in 2016, compared to 83.4 % for those with tertiary education. The employment rate of non-EU nationals (aged 20 to 64) was 14.5  percentage points lower than the overall rate in 2016. People who migrated to the EU to join their families or for international protection were among the groups with the lowest employment rates in the labour market.

Gross domestic expenditure on research and development (R&D)

R&D expenditure in the EU stood at 2.03 % of GDP in 2015, compared with 2.04 % in 2014. Gross domestic expenditure on R&D as a percentage of GDP increased slightly between 2008 and 2012, as a result of depressed GDP growth and a wider EU effort to boost public expenditure on R&D, and has stagnated around 2 % of GDP since then. This means that by 2015, the EU was still 0.97 percentage points below its 2020 target, which calls for increasing combined public and private R&D expenditure to 3 % of GDP. The EU is still lagging behind its Asian and American competitors in terms of R&D intensity, with only the best performing Member States surpassing the United States.

Business enterprise remains the largest R&D performing sector in the EU, accounting for 64.0 % of total R&D expenditure. The business sector has also recorded the largest increase since 2002. The higher education and government sectors contribute less to total R&D expenditure, at 23.2 % and 12.0 %, respectively. Although the R&D shares of these two sectors have grown at a slower pace, they have been more resilient to economic fluctuations.

Greenhouse gas emissions, share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption, and energy efficiency

By 2015, emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) across the EU had fallen by 22.1 % compared with 1990 levels. This represents a slight increase in emissions compared to 2014, when emissions were 22.6 % below 1990 levels. However, the EU is expected to exceed its Europe 2020 target of reducing GHG emissions by 20 % by 2020. All sectors, except fuel combustion in transport and international aviation, contributed to the reductions between 1990 and 2015. Although energy industries were responsible for the largest reductions in absolute terms over this time period, it was still the sector responsible for the largest share of total emissions in 2015.

The EU’s GHG emissions per capita are below the levels observed in many other major economies such as Australia, Canada and the United States. Despite large variations of per capita GHG emissions globally, between 1990 and 2013, a trend towards greater convergence can be observed: per-capita emissions have decreased in the EU, in the United States and Australia, while increasing in poorer countries, with the biggest increases taking place in China and South Korea.

The share of renewable energy in gross final energy production, the Europe 2020 strategy’s second climate change and energy target, increased from 16.1 % in 2014 to 16.7 % in 2015. Therefore, the EU remains 3.3 percentage points below the Europe 2020 renewable energy target of 20 %. Solid, liquid and gaseous biofuels still provide the biggest share of total renewable energy in the EU, also being the largest renewable energy source used in transport and for heating and cooling. Hydropower remains the dominant renewable energy technology in the electricity sector. However, the shares of wind and solar energy have increased substantially thanks to effective support schemes and large cost reductions. Compared to other economies in the world, in particular most emerging and industrialised countries, the EU’s renewable energy share is relatively high.

The EU has also made substantial progress towards its energy efficiency objective. The 2020 target for final energy consumption has already been achieved. With respect to primary energy consumption, the EU must achieve a further reduction of 3.1 % until 2020 to reach the Europe 2020 target of increasing its energy efficiency by 20 % compared with projections. In 2015, the EU consumed 10.7 % less primary energy than in 2005, but 1.4 % more than in 2014. Energy efficiency policies have helped achieve substantial reductions in primary energy consumption, but some of the reductions can also be attributed to lower economic output and warmer than average years, such as 2013 and 2014. Globally, only one major economy has reduced primary energy consumption more than the EU: Japan consumed 16 % less primary energy in 2015 than it did in 2005.

Early leavers from education and training and tertiary educational attainment

The share of early leavers from education and training, defined as the share of 18 to 24 year olds with at most lower secondary education and not in further education and training, has fallen continuously since 2002, both for men and women. In 2016, the indicator stood at 10.7 %, compared with 11 % in 2015. Thus, Europe is steadily approaching its headline target for 2020, which envisages reducing the rate of early leavers from education and training to less than 10 %.

Young men are more likely to leave education and training early compared to women, even though the gap has been narrowing since 2004. Figures for women are already below the overall EU target, standing at 9.2 % in 2016. Residents not born in the reporting country are more likely to leave formal education early compared to natives.

Early leavers from education and training face particularly severe problems in the labour market. In 2016, about 58 % of 18 to 24–year–old early leavers from education and training were either unemployed or inactive. This share has increased by 12 percentage points compared to 2008.

Improvements can also be observed in the share of 30 to 34 year olds who have completed tertiary education, which increased between 2015 and 2016 from 38.7 % to 39.1 %. Provided that this positive trend continues, the EU seems to be on track to meeting its target of increasing that share to at least 40 % by 2020. However, the EU’s tertiary attainment rate still lags behind the rates of some other major world economies such as Korea, Japan, Canada and the United States.

Disaggregated by gender, the data reveal that growth in the share of tertiary graduates has been considerably faster for women, who had already met the Europe 2020 target in 2012 and by 2016 reached 43.9 %. Progress has been slower for men: by 2016 only 34.4 % of 30 to 34–year–old men have attained tertiary education.

People at risk of poverty or social exclusion

The Europe 2020 strategy aims to reduce the number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion by 20 million by 2020, as compared with the 2008 level . The development of risk of poverty or social exclusion in the EU over the past decade has been marked by two turning points: in 2009, when the number of people at risk started to rise because of the delayed social effects of the economic crisis and in 2012, when this upward trend reversed. In 2015, 118.8 million people were affected by poverty or social exclusion in the EU-28, which was around one million more than in 2010, but three million less than in 2014. Although the share of poor or socially excluded people has recently decreased and is approaching the levels observed before the economic crisis in 2008, almost every fourth person (23.7 % of the population) in the EU remained at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2015, which means that the gap to the EU target was 22.9 million people. Additional efforts would be necessary to further enhance the positive trend in the indicator for poverty and social exclusion and to meet the Europe 2020 goal.

The most widespread form of poverty in the EU is monetary poverty. In 2015, about 86.6 million people, representing 17.3 % of the total EU population, were at risk of poverty after social transfers. The second most common form of poverty was severe material deprivation, affecting almost 40.3 million people or 8.1 % of all EU citizens. The third dimension of poverty and social exclusion covered by the headline indicator ─ very low work intensity ─ affected over 39.6 million people in 2015. This equalled 10.6 % of the total population aged 0 to 59 in the EU. People may be simultaneously affected by two or more forms of poverty, but are only counted once for the headline indicator.

The three dimensions of poverty and social exclusion captured by the headline indicator have developed unevenly since 2010. Monetary poverty has been moderately but steadily increasing and the overall amount of people living in households with very low work intensity has not changed drastically since 2010. At the same time, the amount of materially deprived people first increased from 2009 to 2012, and has decreased since then. Thus, developments in the headline indicator were mainly driven by changes in the number of severely materially deprived people.

Across all three dimensions of poverty, the most vulnerable groups appear to be the same, namely young people, the unemployed and inactive, single parents, households consisting of only one person, people with low educational attainment, foreign citizens born outside the EU and people residing in rural areas. Of all the groups examined, the unemployed and single parents with one or more dependent children faced the highest risk of poverty.

See also

• Europe 2020 headline indicators

Further Eurostat information

Publications

• Smarter, greener, more inclusive - indicators to support the Europe 2020 strategy (also downloadable as online publication)

Main tables

• Europe 2020 headline indicators

Dedicated section

• Europe 2020 indicators

Methodology / Metadata

• Towards robust quality management for European Statistics - Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council COM(2011) 211 final.

Other information

• Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 of 11 March 2009 on European statistics

External links

• European Commission website Europe 2020