Investigating environment-society-economy relations in time series in Europe using a synthetic input-state-output framework

The design, evaluation and monitor of actions, plans and policies aimed at improving countries’ progress at both national and international level is a hard task to achieve and requires a variety of tools. Part of the complexity of progress assessment is due to the necessity to measure its economic, social, and environmental aspects. The latest international agreements, such as the European Green Deal, highlight the current need of tools capable of measuring progress for groups of countries avoiding the arbitrariness and loss of information commonly due to aggregation of economic, social, and environmental indicators. Besides this, it is necessary to reconsider the sole use of macroeconomic indicators (e.g., GDP) for measuring progress. These indicators should be flanked by complementary ones, able to capture important environmental and social aspects (e.g., equity, life satisfaction, and responsibilities for negative impacts). Here, we apply an Input-State-Output framework to assess the Environment-Society-Economy relations across European countries in time series (2006–2015) by using two different sets of indicators. Our study presents a synthetic framework that enables coexistence of various information and reveals differences in progress evaluation and monitoring, which result from the use of different indicators. This suggests the current need for policy action tailored to the different situations and needs of different European countries. The possibility to adopt multiple perspectives while performing the analysis is a key feature of this tool. By using two alternative sets of indicators, we produced a more complete picture of countries’ progress. The outputs resulting from such versatile tool may be used for sharing good practices among the European countries, acting on progress across the three dimensions of sustainability, and evaluating the effects of policy efforts.