Comparative measurements of circular economy performance among European countries: Reviewing approaches and limitations

Abstract

Dissensions among specialists over progress of the European Union (EU) strategies for transitioning into circular economy (CE) could be resolved by assessments of countries' performance in this area. Measuring levels of circularity is however in its elementary stages and numerous efforts have been made to improve current CE indicators frameworks. While literature on the topic proliferates and increasing numbers of studies comparing countries' degrees of advance confirm the importance of this research field, a lack of publications reviewing methodological approaches and outcomes of comparative analyses is noticeable. This review is one of the early contributions to fill this gap, reflecting on disparate results of CE performance ranking and clustering despite using the same databases (e.g. Eurostat), on limitations of such studies, and their contributions. Conducting a systematic review, we applied specific procedures to select illustrative examples of studies, replicating their methods alongside additional descriptive statistics to characterise distinctive features of CE progress not presented by the examined articles, which highlight aspects that help clarify details of their findings. A critical discussion section of this paper provides insights into unexplored aspects of limitations identified through in-depth reflections on the reviewed studies, opening avenues for further research, as well as raising implications of conducting analyses and ranking CE performance of countries without considering inherent problems in the present level of development of the EU CE monitoring framework. Given the sense of urgency in successfully transitioning to CE, this study's contributions to aid the effectiveness in research and policy developments offer new possibilities for refining the design of concrete measures towards better circularity performances.

Keywords: Circular economy; Classification; Clustering; Comparative analysis; Ecological economics; European Green Deal; Sustainability.