Europe 2020 Strategy Under the Scope of Life Satisfaction

Europe 2020 Strategy aims to convert the European Union into a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy by setting eight targets that the Members should met by 2020. This paper measures how far European Member States are to Europe 2020 Strategy targets, discusses the treatment of inequalities in the Strategy and the extent to which Europe 2020 Strategy captures citizens’ subjective wellbeing. We first construct an index that synthesizes the eight targets of the Europe 2020 Strategy into a one-dimensional target –EU 2020 synthetic target- and the situation of each EU28 Member State in 2012 with respect to them –2012 synthetic situation-. Hence we can measure the distance of each EU Member State synthetic situation in 2012 from the EU 2020 synthetic target. We find that none of the Member States meets the EU 2020 synthetic target; Denmark is the closest to and Malta is the furthest from it; and identify clusters of Member States in terms of the distances from the EU 2020 synthetic target, the North EU region is closer to and the Mediterranean region is further away from it. We then discuss that setting aside inequalities –just overall poverty is targeted- makes the Europe 2020 Strategy unable to accomplish its own priority of “smart, sustainable and inclusive growth”: it does not only prevent inclusive but also smart and sustainable growth. In fact, when we extent the distance analysis above by adding five inequality targets -income distribution, gender (male and female) employment gap, long-term unemployment, young employment and child poverty- to the Europe 2020 Strategy, we find that all Member States, except for Austria, Cyprus, Germany, Malta and Netherlands, increase their distance to the inequality-extended EU 2020 synthetic situation. Finally, we analyse each Member State’s relationship between its objective positions regarding, on the one hand, the EU 2020 synthetic target versus the inequality-extended EU2020 synthetic target and, on the other hand, its life satisfaction level, inhabitants’ subjective position. We find that the life satisfaction index is more correlated with the inequality-extended EU 2020 index than with the EU 2020 index.