Evaluating the European Pillar of Social Rights: a Benefit-of-the-Doubt approach

The European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) is a set of 20 key principles and rights aimed at building a fairer Europe in the areas of the labour market and welfare systems. The programme was officially launched by the European Commission (EC) in 2017. The EC provides a set of indicators, broken down by the three Areas of competence: (i) Equal opportunities and access to the labour market, (ii) Fair working conditions, (iii) Social protection and inclusion. The set of these indicators is called Social Scoreboard and it is used to monitor the progress of the countries. The work consisted of constructing a synthetic composite indicator using the Benefit-of-the-Doubt method, with the directional approach allowing for desirable and undesirable indicators to monitor the EPSR. In the first Area, the Nordic countries perform best, while the Southern countries are equally in great difficulty. As regards the second Area, the strongest countries are Nordic countries, but the excellent performances of Former URSS countries and post-Communist countries are also surprising. Southern countries display heterogeneous although mostly poor performances. Finally, in the third Area, the Southern countries perform better than in the other Areas with a clear improvement. Nordic countries and Northern EU countries continue to show excellent performance, while the former EU countries seem to have slowed down in their growth due to the pandemic crisis. When evaluating the pillar as a whole, using all the indicators, the main result is the top performance of the Nordic Countries. Finally, a Malmquist productivity index is constructed to analyse the performance change over time. Results confirm the findings from the cross-sectional analysis, highlighting regional differences. Nordic countries show the lowest performance change because they define the best-practice frontier over time. The other geographical areas display performance improvements, confirming the findings of the existing literature for the period 2015-2020. Assessing separately each EPSR area reveals clear differences in countries' performance, especially by geographical region, underscoring the complexity of social rights and the need for more targeted policies.