Assessing the level of innovativeness of EU-27 countries and its relationship to economic, environmental, energy and social parameters

Innovation is crucial to the development of a modern and competitive global economy. In the European Union, innovation is seen as the basis for sustainable economic development based on knowledge to ensure social well-being. However, the diversity of the countries that make up the EU means that despite the extensive measures taken to develop innovativeness, its level varies from country to country. Therefore, a study was conducted to evaluate the level of innovation of EU countries. The evaluation of the level of innovativeness of EU countries was made on the basis of 12 selected indicators characterizing these countries in terms of the activities of the scientific and research sector, the level of human and social capital and the innovativeness of enterprises in the period between 2013 and 2020. The EDAS method was used for analysis. Also, non-parametric Kendall's Tau and Spearman's rank correlation coefficients tests were performed to determine the relationship between the level of innovativeness of countries and selected economic, environmental, energy and social parameters. In addition, based on the determined values of the Appraisal Score index, which is a synthetic measure of innovativeness of individual countries, they were divided into 4 groups of countries with designated innovation levels. The results unequivocally confirmed significant differences in the level of innovativeness between the EU-27 countries. The highest level was found among the countries of the so-called "old EU", with clear leaders being Luxembourg and Sweden, while in the countries of the "new EU", the best result was achieved by Slovenia. The research conducted and the results obtained should enrich the knowledge regarding the evaluation of the innovativeness of individual countries, and should be a valuable source of information when developing strategies for the economic development of the EU and individual countries. After all, the level of innovativeness, as shown by the findings, has a major impact not only on economic aspects but also on the environment, energy and social life in the EU countries.