Abstract
The concept of sustainable development, which has emerged over the last few decades, has moved away from the global to the local level. The sustainability measurements at the global level use the triple bottom line, considering environmental, economic and social dimensions; however, the limited data available at the local level has driven what little research there is to use these optics when considering cities sustainability. In this paper, we use a sustainability city index based on the intellectual capital approach, which considers the three dimensions for European cities. Concretely, we use the environmental and social dimensions of this city index to analyze the effect of different levels of development in terms of sustainability over the main economic variables with available information. The results highlight the importance of the social and environmental dimensions of sustainability in cities economic recovery and show that cities with best positions in sustainability have better performance in economic terms.
Highlights
In the last years, the attention of economists has shifted from tangible inputs to intangibles as key elements in economic behavior
Human capital is comprised of individual capital and social capital, while structural components comprise process capital (PC); commercial capital (CC); image capital (IC); research, development and innovation capital (RDC); and environmental capital (EC) [31,33,34]
The average value for environmental measures in Group 1 is 38.826, while for Group 2 was 42.138. These values were 48.782 and 50.334, respectively. These results show the importance of both dimensions in cities with the highest rates of growth, and the higher value was recorded in Group 2, comprised of cities with the highest economic growth
Summary
The attention of economists has shifted from tangible inputs to intangibles as key elements in economic behavior. A critical role is played by knowledge assets. In this sense, intangible assets become important to wealth creation in cities. Cities must find mechanisms to facilitate the development of knowledge within sustainability objectives. A theoretical framework that considers the effect of knowledge base on economic growth is based on endogenous growth theory [1,2,3,4]. The first considers as key factors technological infrastructure and innovation [5,6,7,8]. The second, and maybe more developed, emphasizes the importance of human capital as a key factor in economic growth [8,9,10,11]. The third considers social and environmental aspects as the most important [11,12,13,14,15,16]
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