Toward the Realization of the “Europe 2020” Agenda for Economic Growth in the European Union: An Empirical Analysis Based on Goal Programming

Goal programming is a simple and widely used technique to solve policy-making problems involving different and conflicting objectives or criteria. It consists in minimizing for each criterion the distance between the achieved level and its respective goal. Weighted goal programming (WGP) is suitable to the analysis of macroeconomic policies involving several competing objectives with preferred weights of importance as it allows finding the optimal strategy for global sustainability which implies several coexisting goals. In this chapter, we propose a WGP model that can be used to determine the optimal allocation of labor in each economic sector in order to minimize the deviations from the goals of four different criteria which model economic, environmental, energetic, and social objectives. We apply our model to each country of the European Union and measure their performance with respect to the Europe 2020 agenda. Our model provides insights and policy recommendations, such as a better integration of the incoming workforce in a context of increasing immigration flows, development of renewable sources of energy, and green sustained transformation of national economic environments.