Regional social progress index of Goiás - Brazil / Índice regional de progresso social de Goiás - Brasil

Abstract

The Social Progress Index (SPI) measures the extent to which countries meet the social and environmental needs of their citizens. Composed by the dimensions ‘Basic Human Needs’, ‘Foundations of Well-Being’, and ‘Opportunities’, the SPI is a set of indicators that allow a granular analysis of the fundamentals of Social Progress currently reaching 168 countries. In this article we analyze the results for the calculation of the Social Progress Index for all municipalities in the State of Goiás – Brazil. The calculation methodology applied is based on the same used by ‘Social Progress Imperative’, for the SPI calculations at national levels. After obtaining and evaluating the results, it was found that the work presented internal inconsistencies, many of them derived from the inadequate adaptation of proxies initially designed for national levels, but which were not suitable for the subnational level. There are still others due to the lack of abundant information for the municipalities in more recent and similar periods, due to the limitation of having some existing data only according to the Brazilian census of 2010. Even so, the difficulties encountered in the adaptations and the analysis of the results generated a extraordinary wealth of methodological alternatives for future work.