EU Industrial Development and Innovation Performance Assessment Under SDG 9: A Lopcow based CoCoSo Application

Sustainable development in the today’s modern world is an opportunity to maintain growth in the economy, technological advancement and social progress without limiting the capabilities of future generations. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has 17 goals with 169 tasks that will guide this progress. The level of implementation of Objective 9 of Agenda 2030 in countries is of critical significance in this context and the research provided in this paper aims to investigate it. This research involves assessing EU countries' performance in regards to developing robust infrastructure, encouraging sustainable industry and encouraging innovation, all of which are key aspects of SDG9. MCDM methods are used in this assessment. The analysis is based on 11 indicators. Lopcow technique is employed to identify the relative importance of these indicators and the EU countries’ SDG9 performance ranking is obtained using CoCoSo method. In accordance to the Lopcow results, the most important criteria in assessing EU countries' SDG 9 performance are rural population accessibility to all-season roads (%) and income gap in internet access (percentage points). According to CoCoSo's findings, Denmark has the best SDG 9 performance among EU countries. Sweden and Finland are ranked second and third, respectively. Hungary, the Slovak Republic and Lithuania are identified as having the lowest SDG 9 performance scores.