Structural Conditions Supporting Circular Resource Resilience in EU Countries: A Multi-Criteria Assessment of Material Use, Recycling Performance, and Import Dependency

Growing material pressure and dependence on external supplies require an assessment of the circular economy not only in terms of recycling but also in terms of the structural conditions supporting resource resilience. The aim of the study was to assess and compare such conditions across the 27 Member States of the European Union and to identify the diverse profiles of their strengths and weaknesses. To this end, a multi-criteria framework was developed based on averages from 2021 to 2023 for eight Eurostat indicators with complete data coverage for material consumption, municipal waste, resource productivity, recycling, the use of secondary materials, import dependency and the economic significance of circular economy sectors. Weights were determined using the Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) method, and the ranking was carried out using the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method. Estonia, Italy and Germany achieved the highest scores, whilst Luxembourg, Cyprus and Denmark achieved the lowest; however, similar aggregate scores were achieved through different configurations of the criteria. The broad structure of the ranking was relatively stable across several methodological variants (Kendall’s W = 0.8716), but this global consistency coexisted with substantial country-specific sensitivity, particularly to the weighting scheme; CRITIC–TOPSIS and Entropy–TOPSIS showed only moderate pairwise agreement (Spearman’s ρ = 0.5629). A leave-one-country-out jackknife confirmed high stability for most omissions while identifying the Netherlands and Estonia as influential reference-set observations. Replacing domestic material consumption (DMC) with the material footprint did not substantially alter the results. The index should be interpreted as a diagnostic tool for assessing structural conditions, rather than a direct measure of the dynamic response to a shock.