Extending Eurostat Green Deal monitoring for just-transition readiness: A compact SDG module

At the implementation stage of the European Green Deal, progress depends not only on environmental outcomes but also on the social, fiscal and institutional conditions that underpin credible and legitimate policy delivery. This paper develops a compact Sustainable Development Goals-based readiness layer that complements the Eurostat Green Deal monitoring framework. Using Eurostat data for 25 European Union Member States, we combine correlation screening, principal component analysis and regularised regression with theory-constrained indicator selection. The baseline readiness module uses SDG_1.10 to capture distributional vulnerability, SDG_16.40 to capture perceived independence of the justice system, SDG_17.10 to capture external solidarity and SDG_17.40 to capture fiscal space; the previous homicide indicator is retained only as a proxy-substitution robustness check. We construct a Sustainable European Green Deal index using a distance-to-ideal multi-criteria method and assess ranking robustness with an outranking method. The extension refines rather than replaces the environmental signal: 2022 country scores remain closely related to the Green Deal-only assessment, while the added readiness layer changes the relative positions of several middle-ranked countries. Separate reporting of the environmental score, readiness score and combined score reduces over-compensatory interpretation and supports diagnostic, rather than allocative, use of the index. A comparison for the period 2019–2022 confirms substantial temporal stability, while also identifying selected shifts in readiness-adjusted rankings. The framework should therefore be understood as a transparent monitoring layer for interpreting scoreboards and country narratives, rather than as a direct rule for allocating European funds.