Community Research and Development Information Service - CORDIS

The goal to turn the EU into the most competitive and dynamic economy by 2010 demands a full benchmarking system to monitor policy performance and their impact on progress. For this reason, the European Commission has engaged in selecting, collecting and analysing a set of indicators that are published each year. The Stockholm European Council has further emphasised the need for effective, timely and reliable statistics and indicators. A main challenge is to develop indicators for the main characteristics and key drivers.

An utmost important and challenging area to be measured is social cohesion. Based on a clear definition of social cohesion, a universally-accepted high-quality and robust statistics to adequately measure social cohesion is required. Further, tools for measuring temporal developments and regional breakdowns to sub-populations of relevance will be of great importance. In order to measure social cohesion with Laeken indicators adequately while regarding national characteristics and practical peculiarities from the newly created EU-SILC, an improved methodology will be elaborated within AMELI. This will ensure that future political decision in the area of quality of life can be based on more adequate and high-quality data and a proper understanding of the Laeken indicators by the users.