Country-Level Evenness Measure in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

Achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires an overall and well-balanced achievement of all SDGs rather than cherry-picking a few. While assessing the evenness of SDGs achievement is extremely important, such analysis devoted to measure the evenness, particularly on the global level, is still evidently absent from existing literature. In this paper, we adapt the concept of evenness from the scholarship of ecological system and biodiversity to assess the balanced development of SDGs for 193 countries from 2010 to 2020. The results of country-level SDG evenness scores reveal a significant inequality across countries. Low-income countries usually have lower evenness scores than middle- and high-income countries; and the gaps even have widened throughout the examined period. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted the decade-long continuous improvement of the global SDG evenness. By integrating both the SDG evenness scores and the conventional mean index scores into a binary analysis framework, we distinguish six development paths in pursuing the SDGs and show that maintaining the overall SDGs improvements while balancing the development of each goal is practical but has not taken place in at least 35 percent countries. We estimate that the evenness score and mean index score could increase by 3.3 p.p. and 2.0 p.p., or 110 percent and 67 percent of the actual improvement in the 2010s, respectively, if each country could follow the effective development path of frontier counterparts with similar income level. Our study suggests that accounting for the evenness dimension could complement the SDG mean index that has been widely utilized by scholars and international organizations to monitor the countries’ progress in SDGs and guide sustainable development policy design. Our SDG evenness scores, complemented by inter-temporal cross-country analyses, could inform policies and cooperation strategies to identify the weaknesses in sustainable development, boost the effective growth, protect unevenly developed countries, and should be further developed in future research to provide deeper insights into a rapid and well-balanced development of SDGs at various levels