Abstract
Sustainable development and its assessment have increasingly played a key background role in government policymaking across the world. Generally, sustainable development is defined as the coordination of economic, environmental, and social development in order to balance intra-generational welfare and maximize inter-generational overall welfare. Therefore, the purpose of our research is to assess national sustainable development from the perspective of integrating economic, environmental, and social dimensions, and then to better monitor the status of sustainable development. We first adopt and modify the National Sustainable Development Index, which has been proposed as a way to amend the Human Development Index, including 12 indicators (weighted by the Entropy Method) in economic, environmental, and social dimensions. After that, we assess the sustainable development status of 179 countries from 2010 to 2016. The result shows that there is no obvious trend of narrowing the gap in sustainable development levels among countries, or even an expanding trend in this period. We also make a comparison between the original NSDI and our modified NSDI and find that the modified NSDI not only retains the merits but also makes up for the shortcomings of the original one in acceptability, reliability, and continuity.
Highlights
Governments and researchers have had the tendency to investigate and monitor the progress of sustainability ever since the UN 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by all 193 member states (Hametner and Kostetckaia, 2020)
The National Sustainable Development Index (NSDI) is a derivative index or improvement scheme of Human Development Index (HDI), so the three indexes with the highest weight are corresponding to the HDI, which reflects that income, education, and health are the basic needs of human development (Bravo, 2014; Jin et al, 2020)
This study is intended to assess sustainability globally based on the modified NSDI, to help policymakers better monitor the status of sustainable development and formulate development policies
Summary
Governments and researchers have had the tendency to investigate and monitor the progress of sustainability ever since the UN 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by all 193 member states (Hametner and Kostetckaia, 2020). The Human Development Index (HDI) is widely used as a sustainability assessment index because of its concise composition and connotation (Bilbao-Ubillos, 2013). It is criticized for not being “strict” enough as it fails to present indicators in environmental and resource dimensions (Bravo, 2014; Hickel, 2019). The first two methods are criticized for their lack of objectivity (Li et al, 2014; Wang et al, 2019), and the third method can only estimate weights if correlation exists between indicators (Khalid et al, 2020)
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