Energy Performance Evaluation of ASEAN+3 Using CRITIC Weighting with MCDM TOPSIS and VIKOR

Abstract

The achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7) in the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) region still shows a wide gap between countries, even though all member countries have been part of an energy cooperation framework since 1999, making it necessary to evaluate the relative position of each country in achieving sustainable energy targets. This study uses a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach to evaluate and rank the energy performance of 13 APT countries over the 2014–2023 period based on three official SDG 7 indicators, namely access to electricity (7.1.1), access to clean cooking fuel (7.1.2), and installed renewable energy capacity per capita (7.b.1), using data from World Bank Open Data and IRENA. Criteria weights were determined objectively using the Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) method based on the standard deviation and Pearson correlation for each year, averaged into a single weight vector, followed by ranking using the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR). The CRITIC results show that renewable energy capacity per capita obtained the highest average weight (0.4218), followed by access to clean cooking fuel (0.3485) and access to electricity (0.2297). TOPSIS and VIKOR consistently placed Japan first and Myanmar last throughout the period. A significant discrepancy occurred for Laos, ranked 2nd–3rd under TOPSIS but 5th–7th under VIKOR, because it simultaneously achieved the highest score on  and the lowest score on , so that the compensatory nature of TOPSIS offset this weakness while the non-compensatory nature of VIKOR highlighted it. These findings confirm renewable energy capacity as the most decisive factor behind the SDG 7 achievement gap in the APT region, while also showing that TOPSIS and VIKOR complement each other in evaluating energy performance from two different aggregation perspectives.