Evaluating Efficient Sustainable Performance of BRICS and Neighbouring Countries Using Data Envelopment Analysis

The concept of sustainability lies on three dimensions of economic, environmental and social parameters. Later on technological parameters are also included under this umbrella term. In this paper, BRICS (Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa) and India's neighbouring countries are evaluated for Sustainable performance. Five different parameters under the four dimensions of sustainability are considered to evaluate the performance of these countries. The optimization technique of operations research named ‘data envelopment analysis’ (DEA) is being used for calculation of performance evaluation in terms of efficiency scores. DEA is a multi-criteria decision-making technique which measures efficiency on the basis of the ratio of weighted sum of outputs to the weighted sum of inputs subject to the constraint that efficiency of any decision making unit (DMU) cannot be greater than 1. Three-decade data is being used and comparative analysis over the time period is being done for these countries. The study gives insight on how BRICS and India's neighbouring countries are performing on sustainability parameters and can be further extended for other parameters of sustainability.