JRC Statistical Audit of the European Skills Index 2022

• Main Authors: CAPERNA Giulio, BECKER William Edward
• Language: English
• Published: Publications Office of the European Union 2022
• Subjects: Norway; Pillar; The Pillar; Iceland
• Online Access: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC128829; https://doi.org/10.2760/629770

The European Skills Index (ESI) is a multidimensional index that ranks the skills systems of 31 countries, all EU27 countries plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, on the three pillars of skills development, activation and matching. The European Commission’s Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards (COIN) at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra was invited by the index developers to audit the ESI for the third time. JRC-COIN aims to help ensure the transparency of the index methodology and the reliability of its results. This JRC-COIN audit focuses on data quality, the statistical soundness of the multi-level structure of the index, and the impact of key modelling assumptions on the results. The analysis suggests that meaningful inferences from the index with special attention on countries with close scores can be drawn. The ESI is reliable, and the framework has good statistical coherence. ESI ranks are shown to be representative of a plurality of scenarios and robust to changes in the aggregation and normalisation methods and the pillar weights except for a few cases. Even though the ESI has many good statistical properties, JRC-COIN has made some suggestions to improve the definition of narratives in accordance with the methodological characteristics. JRC.I.1 - Monitoring, Indicators & Impact Evaluation