EU Social Progress Index 2.0 (2024 edition)
The EU regional Social Progress Index (EU-SPI) is designed as a tool to facilitate benchmarking across EU regions on a wide range of criteria, helping policymakers and stakeholders to assess a region’s strong and weak points on social and environmental aspects. The current edition of the EU-SPI stays close to the structure of the previous two editions, while updating its framework to upscale the measurement of social progress. To highlight the changes in the methodology, this new edition is referred to as EU-SPI 2.0. Changes in the composition of the index make time comparisons of the EU-SPI 2.0 with the previous editions valid only to a limited extent.
The publication of EU-SPI 2.0 is accompanied by a set on interactive tools.
SPI 2.0 – 2024 edition
The 2024 edition of the EU-SPI confirms that social progress varies greatly across EU regions, with Nordic countries consistently performing better than eastern and southern Member States. Moreover, while capital regions often outperform their national averages, they can lag in basic needs like safety and housing affordability. Across the EU, roughly 60% of people live in regions exceeding the average social progress score. This dips to 50% when focusing solely on basic needs, like healthcare, sanitation, and housing.
Results also show that social progress fosters inclusive growth. Regions with higher social progress tend to have lower shares of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion and a smaller gender gap in employment. In addition, regions with stronger social progress offer better opportunities for young graduates to enter the labour market.
[There is an interactive map that displays information about EU member countries. Ed.]
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