Sustainable industrialization performance evaluation of European Union countries: an integrated spherical fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and grey relational analysis approach

Abstract

Industrialization, which has changed with the development of innovation and technology, has accelerated the consumption of energy and natural resources while satisfying customer expectations. Sustainable industrialization is an essential concept to meet the needs of present and future generations. There is a critical need to reveal the sustainable industrialization levels of the countries. Countries that can determine their current situation within the scope of sustainable industrialization can also identify open to improvement areas more quickly. In this study, a novel approach is proposed to evaluate the sustainable industrialization performance of European Union (EU) member countries. In the proposed approach, the evaluation criteria consist of 3 main criteria: environmental, economic, and social, with 16 sub-criteria. The importance weights of criteria are determined by the Spherical Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (SF-AHP) then countries are ranked according to sustainable industrialization performance with the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) method considering the weights of the evaluation criteria. The proposed method is applied to EU member countries, taking into account the 2018 data. As a result of the application, according to the sustainable industrialization performance, the top five countries are determined as Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Denmark. This study is among the first to evaluate sustainable industrialization performances of EU member countries. The study's outcomes can help researchers and policymakers have an opinion about the sustainable industrialization levels of countries