ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses social governance in six Southern European countries, namely Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain, members of the European Union, comparing them among themselves and then with other groups of countries. In this chapter, social governance is defined as the setting and implementation of policies aimed at optimizing social wellbeing. The chapter identifies outcomes of social governance, namely education, health, living standards, gender equality and social cohesion. An index of social governance is constructed across countries using these five variables, with data sourced from global databases for the period 2010–19. The results show that the six Southern European countries registered relatively low scores, when compared to their northern European counterparts, and relatively high scores when compared to the Central and Eastern European EU member states. The average scores for the six Southern European countries was somewhat lower than the average for the EU as a whole. Practically the same results were obtained when the six Southern European countries were compared with 37 developed countries members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. As expected, the six Southern European countries performed better than the developing countries in all the five mentioned variables. The finding that the six Southern European countries can be characterized as being socially well governed when compared to countries in Central and Eastern Europe does not detract from their need to improve social governance. If one takes some Nordic countries as benchmarks, it becomes evident that there is marked room for improvement in terms of social governance in the six Southern European countries, particularly in education and gender equality.
