Social convergence in the European Union

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the existence of social convergence across European Union countries over the period 1995-2012. In the literature, an emphasis is put on an economic convergence, often without taking into consideration the social convergence. However, from the point of view of sustainable development, social area is as much important as economic one. In this paper social convergence refers to a reduction in the dispersion of the standard of living across countries. Due to the fact that the standard of living is a multidimensional category the synthetic variable was used as its approximation. In order to verify that the social convergence process has place in the European Union the occurrence of sigma-, beta- and gamma-convergence was tested. The existence of convergence was tested for the global aggregated measure of the standard of living, and as well for 10 groups of factors affecting this phenomenon.