Evaluation of Sustainable Development in European Union Countries

• Published in: Applied Sciences
• Main Authors: Carlos Javier Martín, María Carmen Carnero
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2019
• Subjects: sustainable development; European Union countries; analytic hierarchy process (AHP); Norway; Iceland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/app9224880

Despite the great importance of sustainable development for a country, it is possible to say, having reviewed the literature widely, that this research is the first to use a Multi-Criteria Decision Method (MCDM) to analyze the sustainability of EU countries, considering different dimensions and weighting the criteria with the help of a group of experts. This paper therefore sets out a Multi-Criteria Model for analyzing the development of sustainability in EU countries (and Norway and Iceland). This required prior filtering and analysis of the data from the Eurostat database. The model was built with the multi-criteria Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique. Four experts in sustainability participated in the weighting process. The results of the AHP model are identified by areas of sustainability, with the highest value found in Norway, and the rest are found around it forming rings of sustainability, where sustainability decreases the further a country is from Norway. This research could be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each country with regard to sustainable development, and by analyzing the measures taken by Norway and other countries with very high sustainability, by continuous improvement processes, reach similar levels of sustainable development.