Environment, Development and Sustainability, 2024 (SCI-Expanded)
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.