Social protection in Poland compared to selected member states of the European Union

Background: Social policy is an essential element of action for every state. In order to assess the actions of states in this area, social protection should be looked at from a multi-criteria perspective. Thanks to this assessment, it is possible to compare the effectiveness of the social policies of the surveyed countries and weigh social policies in Poland against the ones of the surveyed EU member states. Research objectives: The paper aims at designing a measure to assess and compare social protection policies of the selected European countries, but in particular to juxtapose them against the social policies of Poland and develop a ranking of the studied countries. Moreover, the article also tries to find out if there is a relationship between public spendings on social protection and assessment of the social policies by citizens. Research design and methods: The research involved multidimensional comparative analysis and the TOPSIS method. The variables related to social protection were analysed and used to construct a synthetic measure for social protection assessment. Based on the obtained ratings, a comparative ranking of the EU member states was created. The examined Polish indicators were compared with the average of the studied EU countries. The analysis was carried out for 2015 and 2021. Results: A ranking of social protection scores has been drawn up for years 2015 and 2021, in which the first two places are taken by France and Luxembourg. Poland ranked 18th. There is a strong correlation between the assessment of the social situation and average equivalent net income per capita in PPS, as well as average expenditure on social protection in euros per capita. Conclusions: The countries that scored top positions in the ranking of social protection have higher GDP than others. Despite large transfers on social protection, Poland’s position in the ranking remained unchanged. It is justified to conduct further research on the assessment of social protection in order to identify an effective model of social protection policy.