EVALUATING THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND CIRCULAR ECONOMY GOALS OF SELECTED EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

This research aims to empirically evaluate and rank selected European Union (EU) Member States in their achievement of sustainable development (SD) and circular economy (CE) goals. Legislation of the European Union imposes similar rules and regulations, which should push practices towards similar behaviour of every country. Although the research on SD and CE issues has been growing rapidly in recent years, there is still a gap regarding objective measurements of meeting SD and CE targets. This is particularly true for CE specific themes. Moreover, there is a gap in the literature on measuring the efficiency of countries in both areas. The empirical analysis in this paper focuses on yearly data for the period 2010-2016 for 23 EU Member States (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden). The methodology applied in the study is based on the Grey Relational Analysis, a nonparametric approach of ranking entities based on multiple criteria. The ranking was made based on variables that measure SD and CE goals in conjunction, and additionally, by separating the two groups. Robust rankings indicate that there are differences between countries, which are most obvious between the Western and Eastern countries. However, the worst-ranked countries are showing an increase in their respective Grey Relational Degrees, indicating an increase of SD and CE efficiency within those countries in the last couple of years. Policy recommendations comments are based on the results of the analysis. The robustness of the results was checked via another nonparametric approach (Data Envelopment Analysis), which confirms the previously obtained findings.