Ranking of European Union countries with data envelopment analysis approach and principal component analysis

European union is a regional integration project, which has botheconomical and social targets. At the beginning of this study, not onlysocio-economic but also total factor efficiencies of 28 candidate andmember countries of this project (from 1998 to 2003) were estimated byusing Malmquist Index. Afterwards, relative efficiencies of thesecountries in year 2003 were determined by using CCR and BCC modelsamong the models of Data Envelopment Analysis. These relativeefficiency values were used to evaluate the situation of candidate andmember countries against reference countries. Principal ComponentAnalysis, a multivariate statistical method, and super efficiencyapproach were used to analyze these efficiency scores and rank thecountries that have decision-taking units. Results, obtained from thesetwo methods, were compared and evaluated in the last part of this study.