Waste management efficiency within the circular economy framework: a macro-level SBM-DEA analysis of European countries with evidence from Serbia

Purpose This study evaluates and compares waste management efficiency within the broader circular economy framework across 28 European countries over the period 2010–2022, with particular emphasis on Serbia as a late-transition economy. The objective is to identify cross-country disparities in waste-centered circular performance, examine temporal efficiency dynamics, and assess Serbia's structural distance from European best-practice frontiers. Design/methodology/approach In the first stage, waste management-based circular efficiency is measured using an output-oriented slack-based measure model within the data envelopment analysis framework, applied in a year-by-year framework in order to avoid technological pooling across time. The specification includes municipal waste generation per capita as the input and four waste and recycling performance indicators as outputs derived from harmonized Eurostat statistics. In the second stage, macroeconomic determinants of waste-management inefficiency in Serbia are examined using a parsimonious autoregressive distributed lag time-series model suitable for small samples. This approach allows us to distinguish between short-run dynamics and potential long-run relationships. Findings The results reveal substantial and persistent heterogeneity in waste-management efficiency across Europe. Germany and the Netherlands emerge as stable benchmark economies, while several Southern and Eastern European countries exhibit structural inefficiencies. Serbia records persistently low efficiency levels, indicating systemic divergence from the European frontier. The dynamic time-series estimates suggest that industrial structure and inflation are statistically associated with short-run variations in waste-management inefficiency, whereas research and development expenditure does not exhibit a statistically significant effect within the observed sample. Originality/value The study contributes to the literature by integrating non-radial efficiency measurement focused on waste-management performance with dynamic time-series econometric analysis in a unified framework. By concentrating on a transition economy largely underrepresented in waste-management efficiency research, the paper provides new empirical insights into structural constraints shaping waste-centered circular performance in late-transition contexts.