Transitions Performance Index (TPI)

What is the Transitions Performance Index (TPI)?

The TPI is a scoreboard that monitors and ranks countries based on their 4 transitions to fair and prosperous sustainability.

The transition is measured on 4 dimensions

• economic (education, wealth, labour productivity and research and development intensity, industrial base)
• social (health life, work and inclusion, free or non-remunerated time, equality)
• environmental (greenhouse gas emissions reduction, biodiversity, material use, energy productivity)
• governance (fundamental rights, security, transparency, sound public finances)

These measurements are the basis for a new model of prosperity for Europe and the world. A model which focuses on resilience, inclusiveness and sustainability and which supports the EU’s 2022 Annual Sustainable Growth Strategy.

All EU countries and 45 other countries are included in the TPI.

What it measures

The index consists of 28 internationally comparable indicators and helps people see how their country is progressing towards the 6 priorities of the Commission

It illustrates how each country performs on each of the 4 dimensions, provides an overall performance per country, indicates strengths and weaknesses, room for progress, and possible trade-offs.

The TPI is also a tool to give more visibility and traction to the annual Eurostat Sustainable Development Goals monitoring report by ranking and comparing with the EU average and countries outside the EU and is accompanied by 72 country specific descriptions of progress made over a period of ten years

It is also unique by its exceptional global dimension, covering 76% of the world population, and by the 10 years of back casting from 2011 to 2020.

Key findings

• The EU is a strong transition performer and shows progress rates (4.9%) above the global average (4.3%) 
• All EU countries, except Hungary, have improved their performance since 2011, particularly Croatia, with an exceptional increase (13.5%), as well as Greece and Estonia (progress above 10%)
• Even among top achievers, there remains significant scope for improvement, as no country leads across all four dimensions
• The scores of the TPI's leaders and strong performers do not reveal a unique recipe for transition policies
• Environmental transition has a different dynamic than the three other transitions, showing that most countries have not yet bent their curve towards green transition. Across the 72 countries, around 1.4 billion people live in countries where the governance level has decreased between 2011 and 2020.
• While the effect of the pandemic is not fully statistically captured in this year’ edition, the pandemic has a considerable impact on transition processes and challenges social cohesion and resilience, both of which are key enablers for a fair and sustainable transition

The findings highlight the crucial role investment in research and innovation has to support the path to recovery towards prosperous sustainability.

By increasing the efficiency and adaptability of economic and social systems, research and innovation contributes to progress in the transitions measured by the TPI. The report illustrates that some countries could develop and take further advantage of their innovation capacity to improve their transitions’ performance.

TPI interactive map

In the world map below you can

• see at a glance how your country ranks and scores on overall transition performance and in each of the 4 dimensions: economic, environmental, social and governance progress
• see the transition performance ranking of 72 countries compared to 10 years ago and compare with EU and global scores
• click on the countries on the map to see the score, ranking and download country-specific profiles
• see the ranking and score of the 4 sub-pillars that make up each transition dimension

The future of the TPI

The TPI constitutes a simple and transparent tool, sufficiently robust on the conceptual and statistical level to be the compass we urgently need. It also invites European citizens to help define Europe’s transformation and by doing so, contributing to increasing our collective well-being in Europe.

The TPI, like any composite indicator, will benefit from improvements over the years. As data becomes available the regional level could also be addressed.

The Commission's Join Research Centre-COIN (Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards) performed a full audit of the TPI, which acknowledged the important efforts of the developer team to obtain a balanced and transparent result with data sources and methodologies that are accessible and verifiable. The audit report is published as part of the full report below.

Documents

• Developing Alternative Visions for Assessing Progress to Sustainable Development ‘Beyond GDP’
• Transitions Performance Index 2021 - Toward fair and prosperous sustainability
  (full report and annexes)
• TPI 2021 key findings and rankings
• 74 country profiles
• Country profile guide
• TPI database
• Interactive report

Contact

RTD-TPIec [dot] europa [dot] eu (RTD-TPI[at]ec[dot]europa[dot]eu)