The Bratislava Region has long been ranked among the top ten most economically developed regions in the EU by the European Commission’s statistical office. According to Eurostat findings published on 24 February 2019, the Bratislava region was classified as the EU’s 8th most developed region, with its GDP standing at 179% of the EU average. The Bratislava Region does not consider the current way of measuring the development of EU regions to be objective, and is looking for ways to take account of the discrepancy between economic strength and people’s living standards.

This is because people living in Bratislava know very well that it does not have the living standards of Vienna, London or Paris. The Bratislava region therefore has limited capacity to draw on EU funds and pays the price for statistics which, while taking account of GDP growth at regional level, fail to factor in differences between the price of goods and services across regions. Moreover, these statistics do not take into account the level of wealth of people living in regions, as reflected in household incomes. Regions’ level of development should not be measured through the lens of GDP alone. Social and environmental indicators also need to be included in order to arrive at a more comprehensive assessment of a region’s progress.

In March 2019, the Bratislava region started taking part in the European Commission’s pilot project to launch the European Social Progress Index (EU SPI) in EU regions (Pilot Project “Measuring What Matters to EU Citizens: Social Progress in the European Regions”). The Social Progress Index is an instrument designed to identify, in a comprehensive manner, countries’ level of development using 50 indicators, and to provide consistent and measurable indicators for the EU’s 272 regions, particularly in the social and environmental fields. Economic indicators have intentionally not been included in the index. The Bratislava region is ranked 181st out of 272 regions on the basis of the Social Progress Index –a significant mismatch given that it came 8th in the Eurostat statistics.

For this reason, the Bratislava region has long been looking for alternative approaches. At the 7th European Summit of Regions and Cities, organised by the region as part of the Slovak Presidency of the Council of the EU in 2016, it started to work with the Social Progress Imperative, and became one of the first regions to explore the use of the EU SPI locally. In cooperation with its partners, the Bratislava region is continually working to support the position of the EU SPI within the discussions on the future EU cohesion policy, and in recent years has participated in a number of technical events on this subject.

The EU SPI is an important contribution to the discussion accompanying the “beyond GDP” initiative, which aims to look for alternative approaches –other than GDP as the sole indicator – to measuring regions’ development.