Assessment of Sustainable Socioeconomic Development in European Union Countries

Viktorija Skvarciany, Daiva Jurevičienė and Gintarė Volskytė
Additional contact information
Viktorija Skvarciany: Department of Economics Engineering, Faculty of Business Management, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius 10221, Lithuania
Daiva Jurevičienė: Department of Economics Engineering, Faculty of Business Management, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius 10221, Lithuania
Gintarė Volskytė: Department of Economics Engineering, Faculty of Business Management, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius 10221, Lithuania

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 5, 1-19

Abstract: There are still debates in the scientific literature about the factors influencing countries’ sustainable socioeconomic development. Therefore, the current article aims at determining the factors of sustainable socioeconomic development and assessing its level in the EU countries. The following methods were employed for the research: an evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). EDAS was used to reveal which countries have the highest level of sustainable socioeconomic development, and which have the lowest. The ranking was done based on the appraisal score, which is an outcome of EDAS. Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) was used for clustering the countries based on the appraisal scores in order to distinguish groups of countries having a similar level of sustainable socioeconomic development. The results revealed that the highest level of sustainable socioeconomic development is in Germany, and the lowest in Portugal. Based on HCA, the countries were divided into three groups. The first cluster’s countries have the weakest sustainable socioeconomic development, and countries assigned to the third cluster have the best. In the current research, the third cluster consists of one country, Germany, which supports the results obtained with the EDAS method, i.e., Germany is the country with the highest level of sustainable socioeconomic development in the EU.

Keywords: sustainable development; socioeconomic development; multicriteria decision-making approach (MCDA); evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS); hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/5/1986/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/5/1986/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:5:p:1986-:d:328773

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().