On the Road to a Green Economy: How Do European Union Countries ‘Do Their Homework’?

Abstract

Multidimensional crisis phenomena (financial–economic, environmental and social), plaguing the international community, especially in the last 30 years, have intensified resentment towards traditional models of growth and socio-economic development. The European Commission has placed the idea of a green economy (GE) at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy. This paper presents an assessment of the implementation of the green economy assumptions in EU countries in 2018, taking 2010 as the base year. Using taxonomic methods, a synthetic evaluation index (GEI—Green Economy Index) was constructed based on a multi-criterion set of 27 indicators. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: How green are the European economies? What are the main challenges in this context? The average value of the index for the EU countries decreased in the studied years from 0.3423 to 0.3294, which can be interpreted as a slowdown in the greening processes. The key recommendations for the upcoming years include the improvement of energy efficiency indicators, the further increase in the share of renewable energy sources in the energy balance. Moreover, a significant problem continues to be the high percentage of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion, as well as low CO2 and resource productivity rates.