Reducing Socioeconomic Inequalities in the European Union in the Context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

The paper analyzes selected indicators monitoring the socioeconomic conditions of the European Union with regard to reducing inequalities. The main attention is paid to the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goal 10, which calls for reducing inequalities within and among countries. The empirical part of the study is based on two separate studies and the data source is Eurostat. The first study focuses on the dynamics of the SDG10 indicators for the EU27. Due to the limited availability of all SDG10 indicators, the timeframe of this study covers the years 2010–2019. As a result, the SDG10 indicators for the EU27 as a whole are analyzed over that period or via a comparison of disparities between the two extreme dates, i.e., between 2010 and 2019. The second study focuses on the analysis of (dis)similarities of 27 individual European Union member states with respect to a set of variables capturing the socioeconomic conditions of these countries. The method used is cluster analysis, supported by the linear ordering method and principal component analysis. Due to the limited availability of indicators measuring the progress towards SDG10, especially those related to the evaluation of a citizenship gap, the second research does not use all indicators directly assigned to SDG10 (because most of them are not available for all countries), but rather employs a set of additional variables that may potentially affect the levels and dynamics of inequalities among and within countries. The general conclusion of the study is that the analysis of SDG10 indicators over the medium term (i.e., over the period 2010–2019) implies that the EU27 was able to make progress in reducing inequalities among countries; however, the income inequalities within countries persist or have even deepened. The insights from multivariate statistical methods emphasize the existing disparities between a group of countries, including Spain, Bulgaria, and Romania, and the rest of the EU countries in both analyzed years (i.e., in 2010 and 2019), regardless of the set of variables applied in analyses. Moreover, the results highlight the persistence in disparities between “old” and “new” member states and suggest the disparity between the “peripheral” and the rest of the “old” EU countries. Furthermore, the role of expenditure on social protection in affecting income disparities is emphasized, as is the impact of demographic factors in emphasizing the differences in socioeconomic situations across EU member states.