Europe 2020 objectives in the new European Union member states

In spite of the general critics Europe 2020 is still current long term development strategy for the European Union countries, which affects policy objectives at national and regional level. As a result, there is a long term need for constant assessment of the European Union countries’ abilities to reach its aims. With this respect the main objective of the article is to assess disparities between the “new” European Union members states with respect to reaching the aims of the European 2020 plan. In the research the method of taxonomic measure of development proposed by Hellwig and Ward’s clustering method were applied. The research was done for the years 2010 and 2016 with application of the Eurostat data. Based on the applied methods it was possible to rank the analysed countries and group them into relatively homogenous subsets. The conducted research confirmed significant disparities between the analysed countries with respect to reaching the objectives of the Europe 2020 plan.