Archive:Europe 2020 indicators - executive summary
Data extracted in August 2019.
No planned update.
This Statistics Explained article is outdated and has been archived - for recent information on Europe 2020 strategy see here.
Source: Eurostat (see dedicated web section: Europe 2020 headline indicators)
This article is part of a set of statistical articles on the Europe 2020 strategy. It provides an overview of trends in the Europe 2020 headline indicators.
Full article
Overview of trends in the Europe 2020 headline indicators
Source: Eurostat (see dedicated web section: Europe 2020 headline indicators)
Nine headline indicators and additional sub-indicators support the monitoring of the Europe 2020 strategy’s eight targets (see Table 1 in the article ‘Background’). Changes in these indicators since 2008 — the baseline year for monitoring the Europe 2020 strategy — reveal a rather mixed picture. Substantial progress has been made in the areas of employment and education, where the EU has already reached the target for tertiary education attainment and is within reach of the target on early leavers from education and training. However, the targets on R&D investment and poverty alleviation are still at a distance, and progress towards the climate change and energy targets has not been consistent.
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. The strategy’s main objectives strive to deliver high levels of employment, productivity and social cohesion in the Member States while reducing the impact on the natural environment.
To reach the objectives, 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 reflecting the situation and ability of each Member State to contribute to the common goals. 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.
The analysis in this 2019 edition of ‘Smarter, greener, more inclusive?’ aims to shed light on the trends in the headline indicators over the past years, up to 2017 or 2018 (depending on data availability).
Employment rate
In 2018, 73.2 % of the EU population aged 20 to 64 were employed, up from 72.2 % in 2017. This is the highest share that has been observed since 2002. As a result, the distance to the Europe 2020 employment target of 75 % has narrowed to 1.8 percentage points.
Although labour market prospects for younger people have been improving in the EU, in 2018 the employment rate for people aged 20 to 29 was considerably lower than for those aged 30 to 54. For another vulnerable group, older people (aged 55 to 64), the employment rate has grown continuously over the past decade but has remained the lowest of all the age groups. Despite women becoming increasingly well-qualified and even out-performing men in terms of educational attainment, their employment rate has remained lower than that of men. However, the gender employment gap has narrowed for all age groups since 2002 and in 2018 it stood at 11.5 percentage points.
Educational attainment levels and country of birth also influence integration into the labour market. More than half (56.1 %) of those with at most primary or lower secondary education in the EU were employed in 2018, compared with 84.5 % for those with tertiary education. The employment rate of people born outside the EU (aged 20 to 64) was 8.7 percentage points lower than the overall rate in 2018.
Gross domestic expenditure on research and development (R&D)
R&D expenditure in the EU stood at 2.06 % of GDP in 2017, compared with 2.04 % in 2016. The EU’s R&D intensity rose slightly between 2008 and 2012 and has stagnated around 2 % of GDP since then. This means that in 2017, the EU was still 0.94 percentage points below its target for 2020, which calls for increasing combined public and private R&D expenditure to reach the target of the 3 % of GDP.
The business enterprise sector remained the largest R&D performing sector in the EU, accounting for 66.0 % of total R&D expenditure. This sector had also recorded the largest increase since 2002. The ‘higher education’ and ‘government’ sectors contributed less to total R&D expenditure, at 22.1 % and 11.2 %, respectively.
By 2017, emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) across the EU had fallen by 21.7 % compared with 1990 levels, although emission reductions have stalled since 2014. Nevertheless, EU emissions are still below the 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 2017. Although energy industries were responsible for the largest reductions in absolute terms over this period, it was still the highest emitting sector in 2017.
Between 2004 and 2017, the share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption more than doubled, reaching 17.5 % in 2017. Therefore, the EU remains 2.5 percentage points below the Europe 2020 renewable energy target of 20 %. In 2017, renewables contributed to almost a third of the EU’s gross final electricity consumption and almost one-fifth of the final energy consumption for heating and cooling.
The EU has also made progress towards its energy efficiency objective, although the trend has reversed since 2014. The 2020 target for final energy consumption was reached temporarily in 2014, but a subsequent increase in consumption means an additional 3.3 % fall is now required by 2020. With respect to primary energy consumption, the EU must achieve a further reduction of 5.0 % by 2020 to reach the Europe 2020 target of increasing its energy efficiency by 20 %. In 2017, the EU consumed 9.2 % less primary energy than in 2005, but 3.3 % 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 in the aftermath of the economic crisis and relatively warm years, such as 2013 and 2014.
Tertiary educational attainment and early leavers from education and training
The share of early leavers from education and training [1] has fallen continuously since 2002, both for men and women. In 2018, the indicator stood at 10.6 %, compared with 14.7 % in 2008. Thus, Europe is steadily approaching its 2020 headline target to achieve an early leaving rate of below 10 %, although the trend has stagnated over the past few years.
Young men are more likely to leave education and training early compared with women, even though the gap has been narrowing since 2004. People born outside of the EU are more likely to leave formal education early compared with EU-born residents. Early leavers from education and training face particularly severe problems in the labour market. In 2018, 53.8 % of 18- to 24-year-old early leavers from education and training were either unemployed or inactive.
The share of 30- to 34-year-olds who have completed tertiary education has also improved, reaching 40.7 % in 2018. This means the Europe 2020 target of 40 % has been achieved two years early. However, the tertiary attainment rate for men is 10.1 percentage points lower than for women.
People born in a non-EU-28 country had a lower tertiary attainment rate, at 35.8 %, in 2018 than people born in the EU.
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, compared with the 2008 level [2]. 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 2017, 113.0 million people were at risk of poverty or social exclusion in the EU-28, which was 3.1 million below 2008 levels. Still, 22.4 % of the population in the EU remained at risk in 2017 — 15.7 million more than foreseen by the Europe 2020 target. Significant additional efforts are thus necessary to reinforce the recent positive trend and close this gap.
Monetary poverty was the most widespread form of poverty in 2017, with 85.3 million people (16.9 % of the EU population) living at risk of poverty after social transfers. The second most common dimension of poverty was very low work intensity, affecting 35.3 million people or 9.5 % of the EU population (aged 0 to 59 years). The third form of poverty or social exclusion ─ severe material deprivation ─ affected 33.1 million people in 2017 or 6.6 % of the EU population. People may be simultaneously affected by two or more forms of poverty, but are nevertheless only counted once for the headline indicator.
The most vulnerable groups (that appear to be the same across all three dimensions of poverty) are young people, people with disabilities, households consisting of only one person, people with low educational attainment, people born outside the EU and those residing in rural areas.
Direct access to
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- Towards robust quality management for European Statistics - Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council COM(2011) 211 final.
- Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 of 11 March 2009 on European statistics
Notes
- ↑ The share of early leavers from education and training is defined as the share of 18- to 24-year-olds with at most lower secondary education and not in further education and training.
- ↑ Monitoring of progress towards Europe 2020 headline targets takes data for the EU without Croatia from 2008 as a baseline year.