EUROPE 2020 STRATEGY – FORECASTING THE LEVEL OF ACHIEVING ITS GOALS BY THE EU MEMBER STATES

Based on the interdependencies that exist between world economies, the effects of the Europe 2020 strategy is going to affect every company no matter if it operates or not in an EU member state. The purpose of this paper is to forecast the level of achieving the new European strategy by every member state of the EU in order to reveal the vulnerabilities and opportunities that may arise from the macroenvironment for every company. To reach this purpose we used a case study approach in which we analyzed the evolution in the last ten years of six indicators (employment rate, gross domestic expenditure on research & development, greenhouse gas emissions, share of renewables in gross final energy consumption, early leavers from education and training, tertiary education attainment) and we estimated with a probability of 95% the level that each one of them will have in 2020. Data were collected from the Eurostat. The main findings show that only 40.74% of the EU member states will achieve the new strategy and the most important vulnerabilities are coming from the labor market, research & development sector and environmental protection.