DIMENSIONS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN ROMANIA - A DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS

The efficiency registered by a country in the economic, social and ecological areas determines the growth pattern to achieve sustainable development. The contribution of each system component of sustainable development can be appreciated by various indicators. The main goal of this work is to present a possibility to evaluate the performance of new EU Member States related on the three important directions of sustainable development, using information from international databases. The paper used a Data Envelopment Analysis method for investigating the efficiency levels of sustainable development in the selected group of countries. These efficiency levels depend on each countrys specific conditions in resources management. The application of the method led to obtaining an efficiency frontier, and the possibility of ranking the countries in accordance with their relative scores of sustainable performance. The results obtained highlight that Romania did not register enough efficiency in using its economic, social and ecological resources, since consistent possibilities to improve the sustainable performance existed. Some measures are identified for reducing the gaps between the Romanian economy and the other EU countries, which could lead to a better harmonization of the three sustainable development components and could increase their favourable effects.