Common-Weight Network DEA-Based Approach for Circular Economy Performance Assessment at Country-Level

The increasing emphasis placed by countries on sustainability-oriented policy frameworks has heightened the need for robust analytical instruments capable of evaluating circular economy performance at the national scale. In response, this study develops a novel performance evaluation framework grounded in a common-weight network Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to benchmark countries’ circular economy outcomes. The proposed methodology integrates undesirable output data within a two-stage network structure, enabling a comprehensive comparative assessment of European Union member states in which air pollution indicators are explicitly modeled as interval data. The proposed framework generates a complete ranking of countries regarding circular economy performance and delivers a more realistic and policy-relevant assessment than conventional DEA-based approaches with an improved dispersion of input, intermediate measure and output weights.