Using Multi-level DEA to Go Beyond the Three Dimensions of Sustainability

An Exploratory DEA and Machine Learning Framework for the Evaluation and Analysis of Sustainability Composite Indicators in the EU

“…Another contribution of the current paper is the calculation of the environmental performance of European countries with the two-stage DEA model described by Equations ( 11)- (20). For the determination of the inputs, intermediate measures and outputs, the efforts of Tsaples and Papathanasiou [78] were used. The authors study the concept of sustainability and how DEA has tackled it and consider environmental performance as one of the dimensions of sustainability.…”

“…For the case study, the following measures are used: The data source is Eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat (accessed on 10 January 2021)) for the year 2018, which was the latest common year for which data were available for all countries during the writing of the current paper. The choice of the specific parameters was based on the works of Tsaples and Papathanasiou [78,79]. However, as the authors note in their literature review [24], despite the commonalities, the works in the literature use different sets of inputs and outputs to measure sustainability.…”

“…The choice of the parameters that were used to form the various sub-indicators was based on the literature (from works such as [9,24,73,[78][79][80][81]94,95]) and the availability of common data. The authors do not claim that the list is exhaustive, but it serves to illustrate the capabilities of the proposed computational framework.…”

Multi-level DEA for the construction of multi-dimensional indices

“… [17] performed an extensive literature review on the issue and the authors identified several gaps including: an underrepresentation of the social dimension in the construction of sustainability indices, the use of many different combinations of inputs and outputs that is limiting the creation of a standardized sustainability index and an overrepresentation of Chinese regions in related studies. Furthermore, Tsaples and Papathanasiou [18] identified that the methodological limitation of DEA regarding the number of inputs and outputs that was present in the classic DEA variations is still present in all the different approaches to calculate sustainability (whether with the two-stage models or the BoD approach). Thus, there is the need for the analyst to make a trade-off between the number of inputs and outputs that are necessary and the inclusion of as many sub-indicators as possible in the construction of a sustainability index.…”