Evaluation of social factors within the circular economy concept for European countries

The circular economy (CE) is a rapidly growing theme, particularly in the European Union (EU), that encourages the responsible and circular use of resources in the field of contributing to long-term development. The environmental and economic magnitude of development are frequently debated in the subject of CE whereas, social aspects have been only rarely and sporadically combined into the CE. Therefore, this study involves a multidisciplinary holistic framework of clustering methods and Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) for evaluating the CE paradigm in relation to EU countries' social growth. In terms of the social impact of CE strategies, the k-means cluster analysis was used to group the 27 EU members with similar social impact levels. Subsequently, a novel integrated CRITIC (The criteria importance through intercriteria correlation) and MEREC (Method based on the Removal Effects of Criteria) methods were employed for determining the weights of social indicators in order to balance the two weighting methods. In order to select the best country in each cluster, a novel extension of the hybrid MARCOS (Measurement of Alternatives and Ranking according to Compromise Solution) method combined with Power averaging and Heronian operator was developed. According to final solutions, Western European countries in the first cluster have the lowest unemployment and corruption rates, with the Netherlands having the best performance in this cluster. The second cluster includes countries with the lowest employment rates following university graduates between the ages of 20 and 64. Accordingly, Croatia is the best social performance in this cluster. Countries with the highest income distribution and unemployment rate are in the 3rd cluster, the best country in this group is Lithuania. Finally, the results obtained from the innovative MCDM methods have validated in order to demonstrate the proposed methodology's applicability.