Innovation performance assessment of EU: A Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA).

Post-pandemically, innovation-driven growth has become a new trend in the evolution of society. Under these circumstances, evaluating the significant power of the world economy becomes necessary. Thus, the main aim of the present research endeavor is to analyze the innovation efficiency or inefficiency of European member states. By conducting a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which assumes an input-output calculation of relative efficiency scores and constant returns to scale (CRS), it was found that 9 out of 27 European member states are efficient in maximizing output for given inputs. In terms of innovation, the sample of efficient countries consists of nine EU member states: Netherlands, Italy, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Malta, Romania, Germany, Sweden, and Slovakia. On the other hand, the most inefficient EU member states are Lithuania, Latvia, and Greece. Consequently, the model suggests that the inefficient EU countries can be seen to the most efficient countries as peers or benchmarks for improving their innovation level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]