An Assessment of EU 2020 Strategy: Too Far to Reach?

In 2010, EU adopted a new growth strategy which includes three growth priorities and five headline targets to be reached by
2020. The aim of this paper is to investigate the current performance of the EU member and candidate states in achieving these
growth priorities and the overall strategy target by allocating the headline targets into the priorities and the priorities
into the strategy by the use of a composite indicator methodology. The paper determines how far away each member and candidate
state is from the targeted levels of the priorities and the strategy by making a distinction between EU 15 and relatively
new member states as well. The developed composite indices enable the observation of the performances of the member and candidate
states in a single indicator for the overall strategy and each growth priority. The results of the strategy index and three
growth priority indices show that Nordic states possess the highest index scores already having reached many of the targets;
many new member states performed as good as EU 15 and some EU 15 states are placed at the bottom of the ranking with quite
poor performance in reaching the EU 2020 strategy.