COPRAS based Comparative Analysis of the European Country Management Capabilities within the Construction Sector in the Time of Crisis

Construction industry and its impact on the national economy in different countries had been investigated. In general, it can be noted that development trends of the construction industry is almost the same as the development trends of the whole country economy itself. Efficiency level of the construction and real estate industries depends on the specific quantities of the variables within micro, meso and macro context. Although factors of the macro level influence the efficiency level of the whole economy this investigation analyses its influence on the efficiency of the construction industry. Efficiency of the construction industry operation depends on the complex impact of the macro level variable factors such as economic, political and cultural level of development, construction industry are effected by the regulating documents, market, taxation system, drawing possibilities and conditions, inflation, local resources etc. (Kaklauskas et al. 2011). Construction industry development possibilities vary according to the effect of macro level factors. Crisis, spin up in 2008--2009, had differently affected the construction industry markets of the European Union countries. The general part of countries had faced the decrease of outputs, real estate transactions, and predictable reduction in employment of population and quantity of construction companies. Adverse conditions and huge deviations that had arisen due to the crisis encourage analysing the situation of the construction sector not only in the particular country but in other ones, it happens because of possibility to analyse the international experience and get the broader view of the construction sector issues and solve them correctly. Procedure, presented in the issue, provide the possibility to detect the one of 23 European countries which possesses the most effective construction sector market development according to the criteria set. Countries undergo the multi-criteria evaluation applying COPRAS methods (Zavadskas and Kaklauskas 1996), evaluation criteria relevance is determined via entropy method. The first time using the entropy concept (Shannon and Weaver 1947; Shannon 1948) for maximizing the quantity of information contained in the dataset. The entropy is described as the casual value of the uncertainty which makes it more valuable in comparison with other factors. Thus, the main goal of the work is to group investigated European countries applying the COPRAS method and evaluating six criteria, describing the construction sector. In order to implement this goal, economy of the European Union countries, construction sectors, statistical economic data, valuables set according to the entropy method and priority of the European country construction sectors set by COPRAS method will be evaluated.