Monitoring the effective coverage and adequacy of social protection in the EU

In 2019 the Council of the EU issued a recommendation to ensure the access to social protection for all workers and the self-employed. This recommendation includes the mandate, co-shared by the Social Protection Committee (SPC) and the European Commission, of establishing a monitoring framework and developing agreed common quantitative and qualitative indicators to assess the effective implementation of the recommendation. This impulse crystallised into the development of a first version of the monitoring framework on access to social protection for workers and the self-employed (European Commission/SPC, 2020), which, among other tasks, has proposed concrete indicators aiming at measuring the effective coverage and adequacy of social protection systems across the EU. This effort is the basis for the present work. The main objective of this report is to present the results of the application of such indicators, providing critical comments intended to improve the current methodology of the monitoring framework.