Indicators of sustainable development performance: Case study of European Union countries

Abstract

    <jats:p> A sustainable development strategy is an essential long-term strategy that aims to bring about a balance of three key policy factors: sustainable economic growth and economic and technological development, sustainable development of society based on social equality, and environmental protection with a rational use of natural resources. The sustainable development strategy is very complex and contains a large number of indicators, so one of the statistical methods that can be used for this complex problem is the I-distance method. It was created as a need to rank countries according to the level of socio-economic development and the problem was how to take advantage of all the indicators in order to calculate a synthetic indicator which would represent the rank. The I-distance method in this paper is used for the ranking of 18 countries of the European Union based on ten indicators that have been selected in accordance with the EU Sustainable Development Strategy. The used headline indicators come from the following areas: socio-economic development, sustainable consumption and production, social inclusion, demographic changes, public health, climate change and energy, sustainable transport, and global partnership. By analysing the initial set of indicators and their correlation coefficients with the found I-distance values, the following most important indicators were found: official development assistance as a share of the gross national income, employment rate of older workers, healthy life years and life expectancy at birth (males), energy consumption of transport relative to GDP etc. Countries that occupied the top three places were Sweden, Luxembourg, and Finland while Croatia, Poland, and Slovenia occupied the last three places.

Document type: Article