Assessing Euro 2020 Strategy Using Multi-criteria Decision Making Methods: VIKOR and TOPSIS

The European Union (EU) 2020 Strategy aims at forming the conditions for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth targets. Assessment of the EU countries’ situation is of vital importance in attaining the EU 2020 Strategy. This paper presents an impartial evaluation of the performance of 27 EU member countries in terms of each EU 2020 Strategy. For the basis of the evaluation, we propose an effective and easily practicable measure for ranking and monitoring the countries according to their performance by using the VIKOR and the TOPSIS methods, multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods, which allows for the integration of the 22 indicators, and be capable of considering such a broad spectrum of criteria including various economic, financial, demographic, educational and innovational. Our study provides a comparative analysis of the above-two methods. The contribution of the study to the literature is that these methods can be applied for assessing countries in terms of the EU 2020 Strategy which have the multi–dimensionality targets. The results point out new EU member countries such as Slovenia and Romania have attained higher scores than many of the 15 EU countries.