Monitoring upward convergence in the EU with R: The convergEU package

Increasing inequalities among Member States of the European Union (EU) undermines the promise of shared economic prosperity, of cohesion and the ultimate vital goal of the European integration project of improving living and working conditions. The European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) was proclaimed in 2017 by EU leaders in order to support and promote the convergence process both of economic and of social dimensions. Eurofound recently developed a methodology to measure convergence and a STATA toolbox to monitor Member States. This work describes the convergEU R package that, besides calculating the four main measures of convergence,italsocontainssupportingfunctionstodownload,filter,impute,smoothindicators and to prepare country and indicator fiches in Html format. Changes of value for an indicator along time may be also mapped to qualitative labels to emphasize key structural features in a graphical format. To the best of our knowledge, at the moment no other software package allows to produce automatically such a type of quantities in the analyses of convergence.