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.
Latvia: 2024 scores and progress over time
Latvia ranked 18th of 31 countries in the European Skills Index in 2024, with a total score of 58.7. At the pillar level, it ranked 19th in Skills Development (score: 49.4), 13th in Skills Activation (score: 65) and 14th in Skills Matching (score: 62).
The highest-ranking indicators of Latvia, in comparison with other countries, are Over-qualification rate (tertiary graduates) (15.2%, rank 4th) and Upper secondary attainment (and above) (85.1%, rank 6th). On the other hand, its weakest indicators are High digital skills (24.4%, rank 26th) and Recent training (9.7%, rank 21st).
Over the last seven years the overall rank of Latvia has decreased from 17th place in 2017, a drop of 1 places. In that time, its overall score has increased from 50.3 to 58.7. The indicators that have improved the most (in terms of their normalised scores, and accounting for indicator directions) are Long-term unemployment (4.9% in 2017 to 2% in 2024), and Over-qualification rate (tertiary graduates) (21.2% in 2017 to 15.2% in 2024). The indicators that have shown the greatest declines are Qualification mismatch (31.1% in 2017 to 36.1% in 2024), and Low-wage workers (ISCED 5-8) (8.1% in 2017 to 10.2% in 2024).
Note that these figures may refer to imputed data points.