Ranking the European Union Countries in terms of Human Development by Using TOPSIS and EDAS and Combining these Rankings with the Borda Count Method

Abstract

There are conventional measures such as income per capita and the rate of economic growth to determine the economic development of a country. Nonetheless, income per capita turned out to be a poor indicator for human development successes over time. It is often true that in countries with high income per capita people live longer and get better education. However, when only income per capita is taken as indicator, inter-country comparisons can sometimes be problematic because some countries with high income per capita have low levels of human development or vice versa (UNDP, 2015). In 1990, the Human Development Report Office (HDRO) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published the first annual Human Development Report (HDR) in which the Human Development Index (HDI) was launched as an alternative to the aforementioned conventional measures (Stanton, 2007; UNDP 2015). In these reports, the necessity of putting human in the center of national and global development policies is emphasized. It is aimed to attract the attention of the international community in order to increase the quality of life of human beings. Moreover, it is emphasized that it is important to prepare development plans by governments, non-governmental organizations, academic circles and media organizations, especially in recent years. Comparing the development levels of countries, attention is drawn to the concept of human development.