Country pillars
The ESI measures countries’ “distance to the ideal” performance. This ideal performance is chosen as the highest achieved by any country over a period of 7 years. The ideal performance is scaled to be 100 and the scores of all countries are then computed and compared to that. Basis of the ESI are 15 individual indicators from various international datasets. The scores are calculated across countries at the indicators’ level. The scores are then averaged at the various layers and finally the Index score is formed. To illustrate, an Index (or pillar, sub-pillar etc.) score of 65 suggests that the country has reached 65% of the ideal performance. Thus, there is still 35% (100-65) room for improvement. A score of 100 corresponds to achieving the ‘frontier’, that is an aspirational target performance for that indicator. A score of 0 corresponds to a lowest-case performance. This page shows specific information on the scores achieved by the chosen country across pillars, sub-pillars and indicators. Below, you can find a short commentary on country’s skills system performance over time and the ESI 2024 scores.
Spain: 2024 scores and progress over time
Spain ranked 31st of 31 countries in the European Skills Index in 2024, with a total score of 24.2. At the pillar level, it ranked 23rd in Skills Development (score: 43.1), 28th in Skills Activation (score: 36.5) and 31st in Skills Matching (score: 12.5).
The highest-ranking indicators of Spain, in comparison with other countries, are Recent training (15.3%, rank 12th) and High digital skills (36.1%, rank 13th). On the other hand, its weakest indicators are Early leavers from training (7.5%, rank 30th) and Underemployed part-time workers (4.88%, rank 30th).
Over the last seven years the overall rank of Spain has remained unchanged from 31st place in 2017. In that time, its overall score has increased from 13.6 to 24.2. The indicators that have improved the most (in terms of their normalised scores, and accounting for indicator directions) are Recent graduates in employment (65.2% in 2017 to 79.1% in 2024), and Underemployed part-time workers (6.6% in 2017 to 4.9% in 2024). The indicators that have shown the greatest declines are Reading, maths & science scores (aged 15) (491.4 in 2017 to 477.3 in 2024), and Activity rate (aged 20-24) (56.7% in 2017 to 54.6% in 2024).
Note that these figures may refer to imputed data points.