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This study examines the relationship between the level of socioeconomic development of the EU 28 countries and the adoption of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001 environmental management system. First, through a multivariate comparative analysis of the secondary data obtained from the public statistics, a Hellwig’s synthetic indicator is created to rank the level of socioeconomic development of the EU 28 countries. Then, using the total number of certificates issued in 2012 and the increase from 2011, this study has found a correlation between the level of national socioeconomic development and the adoption of ISO 14001 system in their businesses. Although there was no relationship between the number of ISO 14001 certificates in 2012 and the level of socioeconomic development at the national level, a weak negative correlation was observed between the increase of certification from 2011 to 2012 and the level of national socioeconomic development. The results suggest a higher interest in ISO 14001 adoption by the firms from the less developed countries than those from the more developed states.

Measuring sustainable development requires multidimensional attitude as the process is characterised by compound relationships between social, economic and environmental spheres. The paper aims at assessing selected effects of sectoral employment for the three dimensions of developmental processes. We examine employment efficiency in 25 EU countries concerning four sectors: agriculture, industry, market services, and non-market services. We use a non-radial DEA input-oriented model, which allows the assessment of the general efficiency of labour resources, as well as the evaluation of in-depth efficiency in the three dimensions of the economies under study. The novelty of the research lays in both multidimensional attitudes to the effects of labour engagement as well as intersectoral comparisons of the employment results. We categorise the EU countries according to efficiency in gaining the sustainable development and its three dimensions. Generally, the "old" EU members are of higher efficiency than the "new" states. Our research shows desirable movements of labour force that are necessary to improve efficiency and thus offers some advice for a rational development policy. It appears that it is necessary to limit agricultural employment in favour of non-market and market services and, to a lower extent, of industry. We conclude that the structural changes in employment specified by patterns observed in the highly developed EU countries are favourable for realising the aims of sustainable development.

In this paper, we have analysed the level of advancement in circular economy (CE) in the EU-28 countries. First, we used a synthetic measure to examine CE advancement in EU countries in each of the Eurostat CE distinguished areas, i.e., production and consumption, waste management, secondary raw materials, and competitiveness and innovation. For the empirical analysis, we applied 17 Eurostat indicators to the CE areas. To find the synthetic measure in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016, we used multidimensional comparative analysis, i.e., a zero unitarisation method. Second, based on the synthetic measures of the CE areas, we created a general synthetic measure of the CE advancement of the EU-28 countries as well as the countries’ rankings. Third, we classified the countries into groups according to their level of advancement in CE, i.e., high level, medium–high level, medium–low level and low level groups. Finally, we applied a similarity measure to evaluate the correlation between obtained rankings in two most extreme moments in the period of analysis (2010, 2016). Our analysis covers all EU member states, as well as “old” and “new” EU countries separately. Our results confirm that highly developed Benelux countries, i.e., Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium, have the highest CE advancement level. Malta, Cyprus, Estonia and Greece are the least advanced in CE practice. Apart from that, on average, there is some progress in CE implementation, significant disproportions between the EU countries were observed, especially among the “new” member states.

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