Circular economy performance assessment of countries using a common-weight DEA-based approach

The growing significance that nations attribute to sustainable development agendas encourages the implementation of effective performance management tools that can be utilized to assess circular economy performance at national-level. This study proposes a performance assessment tool based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the performance of countries in terms of circular economy. The proposed novel common-weight DEA-based approach, which aims to minimize the maximum deviation from efficiency scores calculated with conventional DEA, is implemented to yield a comparative performance analysis of European Union (EU) countries. The rankings derived from the proposed approach are compared with the outcomes of several other common-weight DEA-based models. The extreme weight flexibility issue of conventional DEA is also addressed. The novel approach, which provides a complete ranking of countries with an improved weight dispersion of performance indicators, proposes a more realistic performance management tool compared to conventional DEA.