Performance Of The Visegrad Countries Compared To The EU-27 Countries, Based On The Sustainable Development Indicators Of The European Union

The aim of our study is to compare Visegrad countries and the other EU member states regarding sustainable development, based on the system of Sustainable Development Indicators of the European Union. We provide a brief overview of almost two decades of elaborating the Sustainable Development Strategy of the Community, review the structure and the main elements of the strategic document, and – using the method of cluster analyses – we group the member states comparing them on the basis of specific headline indicators. Our goal was not a deep investigation, but a compact, thought-provoking analysis; this is the reason why we concentrated on the main indicators. As a result of the analysis, our hypothesis seems to be confirmed: the EU-15 countries and the rest of the member states belong to different clusters, which means that there are significant inequalities, especially from the economic and social aspects of sustainability.