Abstract
In response to the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, this paper proposes a new National Sustainable Development Index (NSDI), based on the modification of the Human Development Index (HDI). The purpose of our research was to improve the widely adopted HDI index by incorporating more comprehensive sustainability perspectives, so as to help policy makers to better analyze the sustainability-related issues facing their countries. After clarifying the concept of sustainable development, our research suggests that this term represents a coordination and configuration of economic, social, and environmental aspects of development, with its major focuses on balancing intra-generational welfare and maximizing the total welfare across generations. We then put forward a novel NSDI framework including 12 indicators from dimensions of economy, resource environment, and society, and calculated the weights of 12 indicators using the entropy method. To further validate our proposed index, this paper also measured the NSDIs of 163 countries in the world, and compared this index with the HDI and other well-known modification indices of HDI. The results showed that the NSDI is a reliable and relative complete index for sustainable development assessment, which makes up for the shortcomings of existing indices.
Highlights
With the rapid global development of economy and society, some environmental and social problems, such as the excessive consumption of natural resources, the deterioration of ecological environment, and the imbalance of social development worldwide, have become increasingly serious
The National Sustainable Development Index (NSDI) uses the Entropy method to calculate the weights of indicators, it is helpful to make up for the lack of objectivity that the equal weighted method used by Human Development Index (HDI), HGDI and HSDI
HSDI or HGDI is an improvement of HDI, while NSDI is a further improvement based on those existing indices
Summary
With the rapid global development of economy and society, some environmental and social problems, such as the excessive consumption of natural resources, the deterioration of ecological environment, and the imbalance of social development worldwide, have become increasingly serious. To meet these global challenges, the UN 2030 Agenda, which represents an ambitious international step towards sustainable development, was unanimously adopted by all 193 member states [1]. The 2030 Agenda includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets, such as decreasing the global mortality rate of children, lifting more people out of extreme poverty, etc These Sustainable Development Goals need to be attained via governments’ decision-making processes, including policies, plans, programs, and projects. It is necessary to build a relatively systematic and complete composite index with environmental, social, and economic dimensions for sustainability assessment and national development decision-making
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