This section of the Scoreboard presents a set of indicators assessing the performance of the Single Market in relation to some of its specific policy objectives, and compares the standing of the EU with global peers.
On this page, you will find the main messages for these objectives. To find more detailed information on each objective, you can follow the links in the list below.
Main messages
Growth, employment and social indicators
In 2023, the EU industrial and services sectors both recorded weaker output than in previous 2 years. Value added grew by only 1.3% in services, while it shrunk by 1% in industry. Over the past two decades, EU growth in these sectors has been broadly in line with the USA and Japan’s, while growth in China has been much higher. The difference in growth rates with China has shrunk over time. However, this has been due to a weakening Chinese performance rather than a strengthening European performance.
On average, the growth of value added in industry has been somewhat below growth in gross domestic product (GDP), reflecting a steady reduction in the weight of industry in the economy. In addition, on average, the growth of value in services has exceeded that in industry. Value added growth in large businesses continues to be remarkably higher than in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
EU employment grew by 0.6% in 2024. This was stronger than in Japan and the UK, but far below the growth experienced in the USA. In the EU, employment growth over the last decade has mainly been driven by the segments of big companies (+250 employees) and the very smallest companies (0-9 employees). In contrast, employment growth in small and mid-size companies (10-249 employees) has been slower.
The EU’s employment rate has been growing in recent years. It was 75.3% in 2023 and is on track to achieving the EU target of 78% by 2030. There is still a sizeable gender gap between the employment rates of working-age women (70.2%) and men (80.4%).
On average, 39.5% of EU adults participated in education and training every year. This falls short of meeting the demand to keep the EU workforce sufficiently skilled to harness the opportunities of the digital and the green transitions and is well below the 2030 target of 60%.
Net earnings of EU households have grown by around 29% since 2014.
Integration of goods and services
For both goods and services, trade integration in the EU has more than doubled in the past three decades. In 1993, trade integration in goods for the 12 EU countries in the Single Market at the time stood at 11.4% of GDP. In 2023, this figure stood at 23.78% for today’s 27 EU countries. During the same period, trade integration in services grew from 2.9% to 7.6%.
In 2022, 13.1% of EU SMEs exported goods to other EU countries, a reduction from the pre-pandemic share in 2019 (15.9%).
The Single Market is the EU’s main source of trade in goods. It is about 60% higher than the EU’s trade in goods with the rest of the world. Trade in services within the EU remains broadly at the same level as EU trade in services with the rest of the world, which is at about 7.5% of GDP.
Apart from the USA’s internal market for goods, the EU can be considered to be much more integrated in both goods and services than other economic areas, whose main source of trade is outside their own area.
Price divergence has significantly decreased since the 1990s and continues to fall further, from approximately 45% in 1996 to 24% in 2022. This decrease is the expected result of increasing market integration.
Economic resilience
EU gross private investment measured as a share of GDP stood at 18.3% in 2024, slightly down from 19.2% in 2022 and higher than in the USA (17.5%).
EU gross public investment (3.6% in 2024) has been relatively stable over the past decade and on a par with the USA (3.7% in 2024).
Research and development expenditure as a percentage of EU GDP has been slowly growing in the last few years and stabilised at 2.27% in 2022. However, the percentage remains well below that of Japan (3.41%) and the USA (3.59%).
EU applicants filed 153 patent applications per million inhabitants to the European Patent Office in 2023 and around 104 applications per million inhabitants under the Patent Cooperation Treaty in 2021. The number of applications filed by EU applicants under the Treaty is much lower than those filed by residents in Japan (395) and the USA (174), but higher than in China (45) and the UK (87).
The EU has far fewer universities in the global top 50 than the USA and slightly fewer than the UK, even though the UK has a significantly smaller population. However, the EU comes in ahead of both China and Japan. The number of EU universities in the global top 50 has remained relatively stable over time.
PISA scores for 15-year-olds in mathematics, reading and science show that, overall, EU students underperform compared to their peers in the UK, the USA, Japan and China. In 2022, EU students performed worse in all three disciplines compared to 2018.
In 2023, EU exports in goods and services accounted for 20.4% and 31.9% of the rest of the world's imports, respectively. Among China, Japan, the UK and the USA, only China’s goods exports captured a larger share of its respective market than the EU’s.
In 2021, the EU’s global market share in medium- and high-tech manufacturing was slightly higher (18.3%) than the USA’s (16.0%). However, both these shares are steadily decreasing and are lower than China’s (29.8%).
The EU has an overall degree of import dependencies in sensitive sectors roughly comparable to China and the USA. Out of all products imported by the EU, the EU experienced strategic dependencies for 349 goods, accounting for only 10% of the total import value.
Electricity prices for EU non-household industrial users have started falling from the peaks in 2021. However, they are still significantly higher than the levels seen prior to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and greatly exceed price levels in the USA, Japan and G20 emerging industrial economies. In the first half of 2024, the EU average price for large consumers, after deducting recoverable duties and VAT, was €0.16 per kWh, similar to prices in the UK and Japan.
Despite the record-setting electricity price volatility in recent years, EU prices remained remarkably more stable than the USA’s.
Digital transition
The roll-out and uptake of digital technologies and the overall digitalisation of the economy are essential drivers for innovation, productivity and prosperity. Despite the EU’s strengths in specific digital technology areas, such as advanced manufacturing technologies and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, the EU share in the global information and communication technology (ICT) market has decreased in the past decade, from 22% of global tech revenues in 2013 to 18% in 2023.
In 2023, the share of SMEs with at least a basic level of digital intensity in the EU was on average 57.5%, which is still far from the 2030 EU target of 90%. In 2021, the share of businesses with online sales to other EU countries was 24% for large businesses and 9% for SMEs.
The share of EU businesses that adopted digital technologies was 33% for data analytics, 39% for cloud services (2021) and 8% for artificial intelligence. The EU’s common target for these three technologies is that at least 75% of EU businesses take up one or more of them by 2030.
In 2023, the average share of ICT specialists out of total employment in EU was 4.8%. This trend has been clearly increasing since 2015 but is still far from the 2030 target of 20 million ICT specialists (around 10% of total employment).
Green transition
Zero-emission energy sources, e.g. hydropower, nuclear energy, wind, solar and biofuels, account for 60% of the EU electricity production. However, the results vary greatly between EU countries. 98% of Swedish electricity comes from zero-emission sources while less than 13% in Malta comes from these sources.
Renewable energy deployment in the EU has been steadily increasing in recent years. In 2022, energy from renewable sources was 23% of gross final energy consumption compared with shares between around 9% and 13% in the UK, the USA, Japan and China.
In 2022, the EU’s average rate of use of secondary materials was only 11.5%, slightly increasing between 2019 and 2022. This suggests that the linear model (no reuse of material) still prevails. The value is very far from the EU 2030 target of 23.4%.
The EU municipal waste recycling rate increased to 48.7% in 2022, still off the EU target of 55% by 2025. The EU’s material productivity improved by more than 20% over the last 3 years, likely due to a combination of efficiency gains and structural changes in the economy.
On climate-neutrality and zero-pollution objectives, the indicators show a positive trend in the EU economy’s greenhouse gas emission intensity (down by 4.2% over the last year). The air emission intensity of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in manufacturing was stable at 0.06 grams per euro of value added.
According to their own declarations, a very high share of businesses (90-95% of different sizes) carried out some type of energy efficiency measures in 2024. Furthermore, on average, about one third of EU SMEs and nearly half of EU large businesses declared that they offered green products or services in 2024.