Macroeconomic effects of the Europe 2020 strategy (original) (raw)

2012, Socialiniai tyrimai

The paper aims at analysing the macroeconomic effects of the Europe 2020 Strategy taking into account economic growth theories. The research problem relates to defining differences how various EU policies, materializing themselves through statistical indicators, impact the EU economic growth as well as how different EU member states are regarding the implementation of Europe 2020. It consists of 3 interrelated parts. The first one presents the analysis framework, i.e. describes the theories of economic growth and methods, such as correlation analysis and cluster analysis, and a data set, i.e. GDP indicators, Europe 2020, macroeconomic imbalances, fiscal indicators and the innovation index. The second part analyses the results of correlation analysis between GDP growth rates and GDP per capita as a dependant variable and 17 other indicators. On the EU level the level of innovations, energy efficiency, current account balance and expenditures for R&D over 2000-2010 ha the strongest impact on economic growth with the correlation coefficient above 0.7. The third part presents the results of cluster analysis. The EU member states are quite different regarding the Europe 2020 indicators, thus 5 identical clusters were obtained, such as the power of Europe, Scandinavian excellence, the Southern path, the middle class Europe, the poverty Europe.