A Methodology to Analyze Sustainable Development Index : Evidence from Emerging Markets and Developed Economies

The paper proposes a new approach for dealing with uncertainties in determining the level of sustainability at the national scale. Composite Sustainable Development Index (SDI) is a tool designed to assess comprehensively the progress made by 15 advanced economies and 15 emerging economies since 2004–2018 towards achieving sustainable development goals. The proposed composite index aims to measure and monitor a sustainable development at the national level, and to increase the understanding of sustainability. This method also sheds light on main problems of different economies at the current stage of their development: the methodology considers a set of indicators and arranged into four categories of sustainable development: economy, society, governance, and environment. The present study shows that during the analyzed period, advanced economies had a satisfactory level of sustainability, while the level of SDI of the emerging markets was lower. Also, the obtained results reveal that since the adoption of Paris Agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015 developed countries have been showing better performance. Moreover, the paper presents the research design of an optimization model for sustainable development with CO2 emissions consideration