Did you Know?

The Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission, in collaboration with the Social Progress Imperativeand Orkestra (a research institute on competitiveness in the Basque region), is in the process of developing a Regional Social Progress Index (EU-SPI).

 

EDC News: EU Regional Social Progress Index

The EU-Social Progress Index (EU-SPI) is an aggregate index of 50 social and environmental indicators (primarily from Eurostat) that capture three dimensions of social progress: Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity. Each dimension has four thematic components which cover topics such as access to health care, the quality and affordability of housing, personal safety, access to higher education, and environmental pollution.

The objective of the EU-SPI is to provide consistent, comparable and actionable measures of social and environmental issues for the regions in the 28 EU Member States (272 regions in total). The index scores absolute performance on a 0-100 scale for each of the 50 indicators included to measure the Index components, thereby, identifying the strengths and weaknesses relative to regions of similar economic performance.

The purpose of the regional index is to:

  • Make a contribution to the “beyond GDP” debate, proposing a solid metric to complement GDP rather than to replace it

  • Help regions to identify peers, at any level of economic development, from whom they could learn and, if applicable, prioritise issues they want to address with their Cohesion Policy Programme

  • Serve as a sounding board for the European Commission services to assess whether the 2014-2020 programmes address the right issues in the right places

A revised version of the EU Social Progress Index will be released in October 2016.

For more information:

 

 

 

 
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