MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION-MAKING ANALYSIS OF CRITICAL RAW MATERIALS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

Raw materials are essential for sustainable functioning of modern society. Access to mineral raw materials and their affordability is crucial for appropriate performance of EU's economy. Industries such as construction, chemical, automotive, and aerospace industry, mechanical engineering and the equipment manufacturing industry provide a total added value of 1 324 billion and employment for some 30 million people, are fully dependent on access to raw materials. Providing of reliable and undisturbed access to raw materials is a critically important factor for EU's competitiveness and, hence, crucial to the success of the Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs. In 2010, the working group of the European Commission drew up a list of the 14 critical raw materials. In 2013, 6 more critical raw materials were added to the list. The criticality of the raw materials was assessed separately according to 2 criteria: economic importance and the supply risks. The objective of this article is to create a list of all the critical raw materials from the most critical to the least critical. Critical raw materials are assessed according to both of the criteria mentioned above using methods of operational research. In this article, the following methods of multi-criteria decision-making analysis are applied: Weighted Sum Approach method and TOPSIS method. The results of the individual methods are compared and discussed.