COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, THE COUNCIL, THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMITTEE AND THE COMMITTEE OF THE REGIONS

Delivering on a more social and fair Europe is a key priority for the European Commission. The European Pillar of Social Rights has been put forward to serve as a compass for a process leading to renewed socio-economic convergence and to drive reforms at national level. In this framework, the Pillar is supported by a scoreboard of key indicators to screen employment and social performances of participating Member States. This monitoring tool would allow as well benchmarking successful outcomes to ensure overall improvement.

The scoreboard serves as a reference framework to monitor ‘societal progress’, in a tangible, holistic and objective way, which is easily accessible and understandable to citizens. It detects in a timely way the most significant employment and social challenges facing the Member States, the EU and the euro area, as well as progress achieved over time. For the purposes of this scoreboard, we define ‘societal progress’ as the capacity to enhance and sustain wellbeing and opportunities, creating conditions for people to reach their full potential and to meet their basic needs.

This definition alludes to three broad dimensions of societal progress: (1) Equal opportunities and access to the labour market, (2) Dynamic labour markets and fair working conditions, and (3) Public support / social protection and inclusion.

1)"Equal opportunities and access to the labour market" covers aspects of fairness related to education, skills and lifelong learning, gender, inequality and social mobility, living conditions and youth;

2)"Dynamic labour markets and fair working conditions" responds to the question whether markets work efficiently and freely to help relocation and job search in a competitive economy. Indicators under this heading cover the functioning of labour markets, support for employment and transitions, and, on the other hand, the fairness dimension with conditions of work and wages;

3)"Public support / social protection and inclusion" covers fair outcomes through public action and/or social protection. This set of indicators refers mainly to the provision of services and social safety nets.

The scoreboard benchmarks EU Member States performances vis-à-vis the EU and the euro area averages. Furthermore, it will provide the opportunity, at least for some of its elements, to compare the EU’s performance with other international actors. Such a benchmarking exercise can serve as an empirical basis for renewed processes of mutual learning from best practices. The scoreboard will also allow the visualisation of longer-term trends. Where possible and relevant, indicators are disaggregated by age, gender and/or educational attainment.

12 areas have been selected on which societal progress could be measured, associated with one of the three chapters above. The indicators proposed to cover these areas are set out in the Annex, and are based on existing quantitative data, collected by Eurostat (derived primarily from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions –EU-SILC–, the Structure of Earnings Survey every four years combined with annual national estimates and the Labour Force Survey –LFS–) and the OECD.

The European Semester, the annual cycle of economic policy coordination, is an important vehicle to monitor closely developments at EU and Member State level, covering the wide span of areas addressed by the European Pillar of Social Rights. In this light, the scoreboard will be discussed with the relevant Council committees, with a view to its use in the framework of the European Semester, and its incorporation in the annual Joint Employment Report published each autumn alongside the Annual Growth Survey. In this context, the first indicators for each area (in bold) should be used as headline indicators for the scoreboard to be included in the Joint Employment Report, while the other indicators are secondary indicators, on which the Joint Employment Report would report in the body of its text, as relevant. Following the increased importance of the employment and social aspects in the European Semester in recent years, the scoreboard will facilitate a stronger consideration of employment and societal challenges within the European Semester, and the euro area and country-specific recommendations that result from it, which may reflect and promote relevant, targeted reforms according to national specificities. It could also be a reference point for the work done on the social dimension of the euro area.