Multidimensional Fisheries and Aquaculture Sector Performance in Selected EU Countries: A Hybrid MCDM Approach

The fisheries and aquaculture sector is of strategic importance to European Union (EU) countries regarding food security, economic value added, employment, and the sustainability of marine ecosystems. However, sectoral performance is multidimensional and cannot be fully characterized by production or economic indicators alone, as ecological and governance dimensions also provide relevant information. This study aims to comparatively assess the multidimensional performance of the fisheries and aquaculture sectors in selected EU countries using a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework integrating production, economic, consumption, ecological, and governance-related indicators. The analysis covers 15 EU Member States with complete and comparable observations across all eight criteria, primarily referring to 2021, while governance data were collected in 2019–2020; countries with missing or non-comparable observations were excluded without data imputation. Country performance was evaluated across eight criteria: total fisheries and aquaculture production, per capita production, fisheries and aquaculture exports, sustainable fisheries value added as a share of GDP, annual per capita consumption of aquatic animals, the proportion of biologically sustainable fish stocks, the extent of marine protected areas within marine waters, and fisheries governance capacity. The CRITIC method was used to derive objective, data-driven criterion weights based on contrast intensity and inter-criterion relationships, while EDAS and ARAS were applied to obtain comparative country rankings. The consistency between the country rankings obtained via the EDAS and ARAS methods was further assessed using Spearman’s rank correlation and Kendall’s tau-b coefficients. Ranking sensitivity was additionally examined under an equal-weight scenario and two leave-one-criterion-out scenarios excluding total production (C1) and per capita production (C2). The CRITIC results assigned the highest data-driven weight to per capita production and the lowest weight to annual per capita consumption of aquatic animals. The EDAS and ARAS results identified Spain as the top-performing country and Bulgaria as the lowest-performing country under both methods. The EDAS and ARAS rankings showed very strong concordance (Spearman’s ρ = 0.993; Kendall’s τ − b = 0.962). Sensitivity analysis also showed strong rank stability, with Spearman correlations of 0.989, 0.982, and 0.900 between the baseline EDAS ranking and the equal-weight, C1-exclusion, and C2-exclusion scenarios, respectively. Overall, the findings indicate that fisheries and aquaculture sector performance in the selected EU countries is multidimensional and cannot be characterized by production scale alone; economic, consumption, ecological, and governance-related indicators provide complementary information for comparative sectoral assessment.