Evaluation of the Effect of COVID-19 on Countries’ Sustainable Development Level: A comparative MCDM framework

Abstract

The extent of the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) had a major impact on health, social life, economic and environmental activities in almost every country over the world. It has disrupted the sustainable development of countries and brought many uncertainties for their future capabilities. In this study, the effects of the COVID-19 on OECD countries' sustainable development were investigated, and the sustainable development performance of the countries was evaluated by the MultiAttributive Ideal-Real Comparative Analysis (MAIRCA) method. Data for the second quarter of 2020 and the same quarter of the previous year is considered. Then, the results obtained by the MAIRCA method were compared with two different multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods called MABAC (Multi‐Attributive Border Approximation Area Comparison) and WASPAS (Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment). The effectiveness and validity of the results obtained from these methods were tested with Spearman's correlation coefficient. Finally, to examine the effect of COVID-19 on the indicators of sustainable development, a non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test was applied. As a result, it was concluded that COVID-19 negatively affected the sustainable development of countries. However, sustainable development performances of developed countries have been observed to be better than developing countries.