Analysis of the Progress of Sustainable Development in the European Union

Due to limited resources, the world’s interest in sustainable development has faced a considerable increase in the last period. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the degree of achievement of the sustainable development objectives of the 2030 Agenda for the member states of the European Union. To achieve this goal, methods such as principal component analysis and unsupervised shape recognition algorithms (K-means) will be used to analyze certain indicators (such as life expectancy, pollution, corruption and gross domestic product per capita) related to the targets that form the aforementioned objectives. From the descriptive analysis of the data, it was observed that at the level of the European Union there are significant discrepancies between the minimum and maximum values ​​of the indicators. Also, it was observed that the indicators have been grouped into three categories, namely urbanization, medical progress and social conditions. Also, among the considered countries, Romania and Bulgaria present the largest gap between the proposed targets and the current data, while the Nordic countries obtain high scores for social conditions (e.g., high GDP/capita, low degree of corruption, high life expectancy).