Social Inclusion Developments - A European Cross-Country Perspective

Although social inclusion occupies a top position on the agenda of international bodies and national policymakers, both practitioners and academia find it challenging to comprehensively define and accurately measure this phenomenon. Our paper aims at exploring the features and the dynamics recorded by main determinants of social inclusion, through employing a bottom-up analytical approach. It has been followed the Eurostat’s delineation of social inclusion indicators into three broad dimensions. The analysis has been conducted for the 28 European Union member states, at two key moments of time, to identify, based on the signals provided by each indicator, the countries recording most extreme values. Indicators recording big values suggest that those countries are exposed to higher degrees of social exclusion, as there are large imbalances between different categories of population regarding the monetary, educational or labor force issues. Indicators depicting small values provide a good signal, characteristic to a state of social inclusion. It has been performed a classification of countries into best and worst performers in terms of social inclusion. An important finding is that, in appreciating the degree of a country’s social inclusion, the leading criterion is the monetary poverty. Indirectly, based on the mutually reinforcing relationship between social and financial inclusion, it can be argued that countries identified to depict a pattern of social inclusion are also deemed to perform well in the field of financial inclusion.