# Evaluation of Sustainable Development in European Union Countries
## 7 Conclusions  
Despite the large number of contributions in the literature that analyze SD in countries and cities, there are no contributions analyzing this question in EU countries with objective analytic techniques, such as MCDM techniques. This study has, therefore, developed a multi-criteria model to evaluate SD in EU countries using AHP. The model evaluates EU countries (and Norway and Iceland), using a total of 39 indicators or subcriteria organized into the following criteria: socio-economic development, sustainable consumption and production, social inclusion, public health, demographic change, climate change and energy, sustainable transport, global alliance for development, and good policies. The assessment provided a full classification of countries via a single value, over the period 2005-2015. The model was designed by performing a visual filter of the data available from the Eurostat database, followed by a double filter using the Pearson correlation coefficient for groups of subcriteria, and a final filter depending on the significance of the available information. These filters look at scarcity of information, imprecise valuations, inaccurate data, and the need for MCDM techniques to guarantee independence between the subcriteria. The model uses the judgements of four experts to weight the criteria and subcriteria, since, despite the recognized difficulty of assigning a weighting to these criteria/subcriteria, not all contribute equally to SD. To guarantee the robustness of the model and to ensure that a logical variation in the weightings assigned to the criteria will not alter the classification of countries, a sensitivity analysis was carried out. For modifications in the weightings of the criteria of \(\pm 5\%\), we see that Norway is still the country with highest sustainability in all cases, and the second placed country, the United Kingdom, does not change its position either, although it ties for first place with Norway and Sweden with increases of \(5\%\) in the criterion Global alliance. With respect to the variations in the weightings of the criteria of \(\pm 10\%\), the three leading countries, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, do not change position in most of the criteria, and there are only a few exceptional changes in a few positions. In any case, it can be seen that variations in Sustainable development would be at most \(\pm 0.1\) with variations in the weightings of the criteria of \(\pm 10\%\). The model can therefore be considered sufficiently robust and gives greater reliability to the results obtained, unlike most of the studies that do not include this sensitivity analysis. This could lead to studies that assign weightings to the criteria, since they do not all contribute to the same degree to Sustainable development; moreover, to continue to assign a similar weighting could lead to a greater error than assigning different weightings. At the same time, it is also expected that a group of experts from different fields, and, if possible, under the umbrella of the UN, issues an agreement on the possible importance of each criterion or indicator related to SDG. Besides the evolution over time of SD in the 30 countries studies, the model returns a single value for SD, taking into account the past record of each country using a moving weighted average of the valuations for each country; this technique allows the results of the full history to be used, giving greater importance to those that come from more recent periods. The weightings used at each period were calculated as the first eleven terms of a first order exponential smoothing. The AHP methodology, which gives relative results by percentages, has allowed the existence of different levels of sustainability to be detected across the continent. These levels are identified by areas of sustainability, where the highest value is found in Norway, and the rest form rings of sustainability around it, such that the further a country is from Norway, the more its sustainability decreases.