Indicatori comuni del PNRR e framework SDGs: una proposta di indicatore composito

TL;DR

This paper empirically examines the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility's monitoring indicators and proposes a composite index linking them with SDGs to assess progress in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain from 2014 to 2021.

Contribution

It introduces a novel linkage between RRF indicators and SDGs, creating a composite index to evaluate sustainable development progress in European countries.

Findings

Widespread improvements in the composite index across four countries.

Partial reduction of divergence among countries' progress.

First empirical evidence linking RRF indicators with SDGs.

Abstract

The main component of the NextGeneration EU (NGEU) program is the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), spanning an implementation period between 2021 and 2026. The RRF also includes a monitoring system: every six months, each country is required to send an update on the progress of the plan against 14 common indicators, measured on specific quantitative scales. The aim of this paper is to present the first empirical evidence on this system, while, at the same time, emphasizing the potential of its integration with the sustainable development framework (SDGs). We propose to develop a first linkage between the 14 common indicators and the SDGs which allows us to produce a composite index (SDGs-RRF) for France, Germany, Italy, and Spain for the period 2014-2021. Over this time, widespread improvements in the composite index across the four countries led to a partial reduction of the divergence. The proposed approach represents a first step towards a wider use of the SDGs for the assessment of the RRF, in line with their use in the European Semester documents prepared by the European Commission.