ABSTRACT. The global financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression, has caused many countries loose to hundreds of billions of dollars in countries and, stroked several financial institutions, that just months ago seemed sound. The continuous financial crises appeared as the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US in mid-2007. The global financial crisis which first started in the United States of America (the USA) is becoming contagious and is seemingly influencing directly or indirectly, every economy on the globe. The financial crisis is based on a banking practice called sub-prime lending or sub-prime mortgage lending in the USA. The reasons for this can be attributed to a set of complicated banking problems that grew over time, due to the housing and credit markets differences, the inadequate judgment by the borrowers and/or the lenders, the inability of home owners to make mortgage payments, the speculation and the overbuilding during the boom period, the risky mortgage products (financial innovations with concealed default risks), the high personal and corporate debt profiles and the inactive/weak central bank policies. This financial crisis has had a major impact on the global economy and has hurt many countries. The effects on the rest of the world are indeed significant and will continue to have negative impacts as long as this recession continues. This paper aims to analyze the determinants of the financial crisis and the recession in the world. In particular, we are focusing on the following countries where the effects of the crisis were severely experienced by using the Topsis method: Italy, Greece, Spanish, Portugal, Ireland and Turkey. The evaluation criteria and sub-criteria used to evaluate the macroeconomic performance are defined as follows: Economic Growth (EG), Inflation rate (IR), Un- employment Rate (UR), Current Account Balance (CAB), Budget Balance rate (BB). pp. 122–136
JEL: F01, O47, L1

Keywords: global financial crisis, economic performance, sustainable growth, Topsis method