SDG Composite Indicators for EU Countries

Sustainable development is firmly anchored in European treaties and is at the heart of European policy, as evidenced by the relevance of the 2030 Agenda within European policy plans. The EU is fully committed to playing an active role in helping to progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. To assess the degree of effectiveness of European policies currently implemented in the context of sustainable development, it is necessary to define an adequate monitoring system based on quantitative performance indicators. In this paper we propose a possible synthesis of a vast set of indicators to measure, for each Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs), and compile the trend of European countries with respect to the EU27 average. Complexity represents the greatest challenge of monitoring the 2030 Agenda. In this perspective, composite indices represent a useful tool that can synthetically show the national performance for each goal. The aim is to offer a clear assessment of the performance of each nation, in terms of achieving the SDGs, also by analysing the impact that the pandemic crisis had on member states’ ability to achieve the SDGs. Within this analytical framework, the goal of reducing inequalities is the central issue. Inequalities cause economic and social instability and create an obstacle to the adoption of strategies and behaviours in favour of the sustainable development. Since inequality is a cross-cutting issue for all the SDGs, as stated in the principle “Leave no one behind” of the Agenda, an innovative indicator based on the composite indices is proposed to measure the historical evolution of inequalities between European countries for each of the 17 SDGs.