Purpose

The Green Deal strategy of the European Union (EU) as well as the increasing concerns over resource scarcity worldwide has put forward such concepts as the circular economy. This paper seeks to compare the progress of the development of the circular economy across the EU Member States. Such analysis is helpful in guiding the circular economy support policies.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper develops a quantitative framework for analysis of the implementation of the circular economy objectives in the EU Member States. The framework proposed includes three multi-criteria decision making methods representing reference point and outranking approaches. The use of multiple methods allows exploiting the differences in the underlying aggregation principles.

Findings

Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands appear as the most advanced in the sense of circular economy development. The results indicate that the water-locked small countries and the new EU Member States are among the lowest performing ones. The flows of the waste need to be monitored more tightly in order to increase the circularity. The development of recycling facilities can also increase circularity irrespectively of the economic development level (e.g. the case of Bulgaria).

Originality/value

The paper contributes to the discussion regarding the circular economy by proposing an indicator system and the multi-criteria analysis framework. The proposed indicator system covers input use (circularity), trade flows and recycling processes. The proposed framework can be applied to track the progress of different countries in implementing the targets of the circular economy.

中文翻译：

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欧盟循环经济的发展和综合评估：优胜劣汰的方法

目的

欧盟（EU）的绿色交易战略以及全球对资源稀缺性的日益关注，提出了循环经济等概念。本文旨在比较欧盟成员国循环经济发展的进展。这样的分析有助于指导循环经济的支持政策。

设计/方法/方法

本文开发了一个量化框架，用于分析欧盟成员国循环经济目标的实施情况。提议的框架包括三个多标准决策方法，代表参考点和排名方法。多种方法的使用允许利用底层聚合原则中的差异。

发现

德国、瑞典和荷兰在循环经济发展方面显得最为先进。结果表明，水封小国和欧盟新成员国是表现最差的国家之一。需要更严格地监测废物流，以提高循环性。无论经济发展水平如何（例如保加利亚），回收设施的发展也可以提高循环性。

原创性/价值

本文提出了一个指标体系和多标准分析框架，为循环经济的讨论做出了贡献。拟议的指标系统涵盖投入使用（循环性）、贸易流量和回收过程。拟议的框架可用于跟踪不同国家在实施循环经济目标方面的进展。