Brussels, 18/07/2013 (Agence Europe) - If a single scoreboard on the social situation in member states is going to be possible, as envisaged for the social dimension in the economic and monetary union (EMU) project, upstream work will be required to develop new instruments, whilst updating those that already exist. Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, has thus presented, for the first time, “all social statistics on the EU in one publication”. The Commission has also examined existing problems, in an effort to obtain updated information on social developments in EU countries, particularly those that have been hit hardest by the crisis and the subsequent budget austerity measures.
Commissioner Laszlo Andor, responsible for employment and social affairs, has already emphasised on several occasions that: the EU does not have sufficiently homogenous and updated data to obtain a clear picture of the social situation in the EU as a whole. A social crisis exists there but the EU is still having difficulty in providing a detailed picture of it. This is why the Commission will be presenting, before the end of the year, a proposal for introducing the scoreboard, whose objective will today provide greater visibility to EMU's social dimension during the macro-economic decision-making process, in an effort to enforce follow-up and coordination of social and employment policies.
The scoreboard in question must, however, be based on reliable, up-to-date and homogenous data. On Wednesday 17 July, Eurostat provided its first contribution to this question by bringing together in a single document a comprehensive summary of available social statistics. This includes several chapters focusing on population, health and security, education and training, the labour market, income and living conditions, social welfare, crime and criminal justice.
These data are, however, insufficient. As the Commission noted in its working document published at the beginning of July, “currently, at EU and member state level, the lack of fresh data on the social situation of households hampers the monitoring of poverty and inequalities as well as the assessment of the impact of the crisis and policy responses on households”. To rectify this problem, the Commission is therefore proposing to make “use of sources of information going beyond the more traditional indicators available to monitor poverty and inequalities” and to obtain new data more rapidly and a regular basis.
These new indicators should help to provide a clearer image of poverty and the repercussions of crisis in the EU by taking into account “early estimates of material deprivation” including “subjective poverty”; changes in gross household disposable income; the analysis of developments in monthly income; the possibility of carrying out micro-simulations of future developments; the analysis of “behavioural response of households in reaction to an income shock” and “trends in the disbursement of social benefits”. (JK/transl.fl)