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Benchmarking the analysis of countries' performance in terms of sustainable development helps to understand the success factors of countries that over perform and to target priority issues of others with lower performance. However, assessing sustainable development comes with methodological challenges, including indicator standardization, aggregation and weighting. Our study significantly contributes to the measure of sustainable development by providing a new approach based on an extended Hellwig method. After describing the main limitations of existing methodologies, this paper's aim is twofold. First, we show that the proposed analytical framework allows for comparing the sustainable performance of EU countries on the national level. The extended Hellwig method takes into consideration EU targets and/or national targets in building patterns of development. Second, this framework is tested as a part of the evaluation of the implementation of the Europe 2020 strategy in the education area. The results obtained using the extended Hellwig method were compared with those obtained by means of the Education Index, TOPSIS and Ward technique. Our analysis showed the significant disparities in the implementation of the Europe 2020 strategy recommendations in the education area in 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the annual time series and the average annual growth rate of the European Gender Equality Index, which was proposed by Bericat (Soc Indic Res 108:1-28, ), for the EU and its 27 member countries for the period 2000-2011. The paper also reports the time series and average annual growth rate for each of the three subdimensions of gender equality-education, work, and power-and the underlying indicators for each subdimension for EU as a whole. The calculated index shows that in the period 2000-2011, overall gender equality, equality in education, work, and power in the EU has been improving at a rate of 1.7, 0.92, 0.65, and 3.48 % per year, respectively. By 2011, overall gender equality, and equality in education, work, and power has reached 58.3, 77.4, 60.9, and 42.7, respectively. In short, this paper offers the scientific community, as well as those that design and implement public policies, a robust, valid and precise synthetic description of the current situation and evolution, from 2000 to 2011, of structural gender equality in European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is aimed at presenting a new intergenerational mobility index that (a) combines the intergenerational elasticity and the R-squared of the intergenerational regression and (b) enables the expression of the total degree of mobility as the weighted sum of mobility with respect to both parents. As a case study, we apply our proposal to investigate the intergenerational mobility of education in several European countries and its changes across birth cohorts. The results derived from the proposed index indicate that Nordic countries display higher levels of educational mobility than Southern countries, whereas continental countries are in an intermediate position. Moreover, it appears that the degree of mobility increases over time only in those countries with low initial levels and remains stable for the most mobile countries. Finally, for most of the countries the proposed methodology can prove that the degree of educational mobility with respect to each parent tends to converge to the same level over the course of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We calculate aggregate and comparable measures of mismatch in the labour market for 30 European countries. These indicators measure vertical mismatch (related to the level of education, e.g. overeducation, and undereducation) and horizontal mismatch (related to the field of education) and are comparable across countries and through time. In European countries, between 15 % to nearly 35 % of workers have a job for which they have more (or less) qualifications than the usual level. Approximately 20 % to nearly 50 % work in a job for which they do not have the usual field qualification. There is a great variability on mismatch across European labour markets. Undereducation affects more workers than overeducation in most European countries. Low correlations between mismatch and unemployment indicate that mismatch should be regarded as an additional informative variable, thus useful to characterize labour markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most work studying the impact of fiscal decentralization on the provision of public services has measured the latter by way of quantitative output indicators (for example, years of schooling or mortality rates) and the former based on aggregate decentralization indicators reflecting sub-central government spending or revenue as a percentage of total spending or revenue. In this article, we reconsider the link between fiscal decentralization and public service provision based on perception-based measures of the quality of public services as well as decentralization measures that disaggregate spending according to expenditure functions. Specifically, we examine the impact of decentralizing spending in the areas of education, health and social protection down to local (municipal) governments, on perceptions concerning the quality of public services, across a panel of 30 European countries over the period 1996–2015. We find that decentralizing education and social protection spending improves the perceived quality of public services while decentralizing health expenditure undermines quality. Our empirical results are robust to the introduction of a range of potentially important covariates including measures that reflect on the degree of autonomy enjoyed by local authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inequality of Opportunity (IO) refers to that inequality stemming from factors, called circumstances, beyond the scope of individual responsibility, such as gender, race, place of birth or socioeconomic background. In general, circumstances do not directly convert into future individual's income. Indeed, different circumstances in childhood lead to different levels of education and different occupational categories which, in turn, contribute to generate divergent levels of income during adulthood. Using the Intergenerational Transmission modules in 2005 and 2011 from the EU-SILC, we estimate the importance of attained education and occupational category as mediating channels in the generation of IO in 26 European countries. We find that the attained level of education channels up to 30% of total IO, with important differences across Europe. Once attained education is taken into account, occupation explains less than 5% of IO in most countries. Moreover, the importance of education as a channel for IO is negatively correlated both with the share of the population that attains tertiary levels of education and with the importance of government expenditure in education relative to GDP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]