Circular economy as assistance for sustainable development in OECD countries

Abstract

Research background: Circular economy is of great importance, as it plays a vital role in ensuring the reuse of waste created and, therefore, reduces the waste of limited resources, which is the primary goal of the general economic concept. In line with the circular economy, sustainable development gains great attention, as the United Nations announced the sustainable development goals that should be reached by 2030. Hence, the current paper aims at examining whether the circular economy could be treated as an effective assistance tool for sustainable development of OECD countries.
 Purpose of the article: The paper aims to investigate whether the circular economy could serve as an assistance tool for sustainable development and, therefore, seeks to determine if the circular economy could directly impact a country?s sustainable development.
 Methods: First, the countries chosen were prioritised using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Evaluation Based on Distance from Average Solution (EDAS) methodologies. AHP method was used for weight assignment to the circular economy indicators that were further used for OECD countries? prioritisation procedure for which multi-criteria decision-making method EDAS was employed. Second, to reveal a link between the circular economy ranking results and sustainable development, a comparative analysis was done. Third, the impact of the country?s circular economy on sustainable development was evaluated using the fixed-effect regression model on four years of panel data from 2016 to 2019 for the sample of 32 OECD countries.
 Findings & value-added: The comparative analysis of the circular economy?s prioritisation results and Sustainable Development Goals Index (SDGI) ranking showed 20 out of 32 matches, assuming a link between the circular economy and sustainable development could be made. The fixed-effect regression equation results demonstrate that the unemployment rate, poverty rate, air pollution exposure, and CO2 emission per capita negatively influence sustainable development. In contrast, indicators such as gross domestic expenditure on R&D, renewable energy, number of passenger cars in use, and households with Internet access positively impact SDGI. The hypothesis that the circular economy is seen as an assistance for sustainable development and directly affects a country?s sustainability was approved. The paper contributes to the scientific literature in the field of circular economy and sustainable development interaction and could be seen as an assumption for new research directions, focusing on the linkage between circular economy and sustainable development. Moreover, the obtained results could contribute to a country?s policy-makers by highlighting the essential indicators of a circular economy that should be considered while forming the strategy of a country?s sustainable development.

Sustainable Health and Wellbeing in the European Union

“…( 48 , 57 – 59 ). Consequently, research of health systems' parameters and their indicators represents a fundamental platform for a creation of efficient policies that would lead to population health improvement and its sustainability ( 60 , 61 ). Last but not the least, it would enable reducing international, national, and regional differences in health, which also represents one of the WHO's priorities ( 62 ).…”

Environmental Sustainability Assessment of the European Union’s Capital Cities

“…The development of the concept of sustainable development since the 1960 s has resulted in a growing number of methodologies, models, approaches, and appraisals for assessing sustainability. It is estimated that at present there may be several hundred different instruments for assessing sustainability [ 28 , 29 ].…”

Applying the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process for classifying and prioritizing healthcare quality attributes

“…One of the main advantages of the AHP method is represented by its use in a wide variety of application fields like: marketing (Wind and Saaty, 1980;Mark, 2001;Dima & Vasilache, 2016), energy (Pohekar and Ramachandran, 2004), medical and healthcare decision making (Liberatore and Nydick, 2008), project selection related to research and development (R & D) and the allocation of resources (Heidenberger and Stummer, 1999;Skvarciany et al, 2021). Leung and Cao (2000) discussed the idea that one of the main reasons for having a low accuracy in the traditional AHP method for obtaining customers' reactions is because the person must assign a categorical value to the pairwise comparison based o n his own perception.…”