Assessment of the social progress on European Union by logarithmic decomposition of criteria importance

Social progress is a hot topic in our rapidly developing world. Scales with different perspectives are being developed to measure the social progress of countries. One of the prominent is the SPI (Social Progress Index). The EU (European Union) has a structure with powerful interaction and recently expanding. The member countries must have a similar level of social progress to adapt to each other and for the healthy functioning of the union. Therefore this study aims to provide a clustering structure of countries in terms of social progress and evaluate member states via the MCDM (Multi-Criteria Decision-Making) perspective. In this study there are three phases. First, the k-means algorithm was used to group EU member states that are similar in terms of social progress. Second, a novel LODECI (LOgarithmic DEcomposition Of Criteria Importance) method depending on contrast intensity assesses the criteria weights. Last, a novel hybrid CoCoSo-L (Combined Compromise Solution with LODECI) proposed to rank member countries. According to the results, while the social development level of former members and northern countries are higher, the level of new members and southern countries are lower.