DEA-based composite index for innovation-integrated human development performance assessment of countries
提出一种基于数据包络分析的两阶段综合指数，将创新指标整合进人类发展绩效评估，对欧盟国家进行排名并与传统人类发展指数比较。
The Human Development Index (HDI) introduced by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) offers a unique quantitative measure that encompasses advancements in three fundamental aspects of human development: health, education, and living standards. However, focusing on only three dimensions when evaluating human development performance of countries is not adequate in today’s digital world. This study proposes a data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based composite index to provide an innovation-integrated human development performance assessment tool for countries. The novel two-stage common-weight DEA-based approach proposed in here is applied in a case study examining the performance assessment of European Union (EU) countries. The first stage of the developed methodology consists of solving the novel commonweight DEA-based approach with HDI indicators as the outputs and the Gini coefficient as the input. At the second stage, innovation-based indicators from World Bank database are used to evaluate innovation efficiency of EU countries. The composite index that yields the complete ranking of EU countries in terms of innovation-integrated human development performance is computed as the product of the efficiency scores resulting from these two stages. The rankings produced by the proposed approach are compared with the HDI rankings as well as the results obtained from various common-weight DEA-based models. First published online 27 November 2025