Abstract:

Despite the fact that in the times of global crisis everything is about survival, the welfare is still an important matter for people. In this paper we propose to calculate a representative quantitative indicator for welfare for the 27 state members of the European Union in order to establish certain connections between the level of welfare and some factors of influence like, GDP, education, long learning public expenditure, unemployment and vulnerable employment.

Our approach underlines once more that the outcome of research and development activity, of education and long learning and also of social care protection improves the sustainability of welfare for every nation. There is a positive correlation between the new welfare indicator and some of the indicators mentioned above. Nevertheless, the effects of those factors aren’t immediate and this fact is reflected in the number of lags for each exogenous variable taking into analysis.

In order to connect to the current economic problems such as high level of unemployment, that the most member states in the European Union are facing we tested the relationship between welfare and unemployment rate and the results sustain the assumption of a negative correlation between them.