The logistics and sustainability in the European Union

Abstract

The paper is focused on the issue of business logistics performance and sustainability of countries in the EU due to their constantly growing importance in the social, economic and environmental field. We assume a significant dependence between the mentioned quantities. To research the relationship between business logistics performance and sustainability, we used the data of the business logistics performance index and the sustainability index across each EU countries. The importance of the selected indices lies in the ability to identify possible opportunities and challenges of business logistics as a benchmarking tool to increase its performance. To assess the relationship of these researched parameters, we applied the correlation coefficient, cluster and geographic analysis to identify relatively homogeneous groups - EU countries - clusters with the greatest possible difference within the clusters. The results proved a statistically significant dependence between the performance of business logistics and sustainability in EU member states. From a geographic analysis perspective, we have identified a tendency to create geographically close groupings of EU countries within the examined parameters.