The circular economy and the EU27 countries performance

: a comparative analysis

Abstract

In order to evaluate the performance of the European Union (EU) 27, its supranational regions and its Member States (MS), in the field of Circular Economy (CE) practices adopted, this research focused its efforts on a quantitative analysis, applying the Alkire-Foster (AF) method, through which the development of the Multidimentional Circular Economy Index (MCEI) came to fruition. Results show that, even though two different time periods are considered, 2008-15 and 2016-21, in both of them, the results stay almost the same, with a few exceptions scattered across the EU27. For both time periods, most MS perform poorly in the implementation of a circular economy when compared to the EU expectations. The Central and Eastern Europe and Northern Europe regions seem to be the regions with the least satisfactory performance regarding CE practices adopted. The reason lies in the low resource productivity present in the Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania MS, which has been partially compensated by the EU structural investment funds (Staehr & Urke, 2022, p.1053). A great disparity in MS individual composite scores, within the same region is also observed in all of the four supranational regions considered, meaning that the promotion of these practices comes, at first hand, from a national policy perspective.

Date of Award	13 Jul 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Leonardo Costa (Supervisor) & Alexandra Leitão (Supervisor)