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The Sustainable Development Index: An Integration of the Ecological Framework Considering the Governance-development Nexus
University of Perugia, Umbria, Italy
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Received: 6 July 2024 Accepted: 12 September 2024 Published: 1 November 2024
This article is part of the Special Issue Economic Growth and Environmental Degradation.
Abstract
This paper aims to enhance the formulation of the Sustainable Development Index (SDI) by introducing a further correction term, governance lack (GL) index, in additional to the ecological impact index (EII). The GL considers a country’s governance lack by calculating a governance index (GI) with the World Governance Indicators (WGIs) starting from 1996. The SDI(g) retains the original formula of the SDI, thus remaining an indicator of strong environmental sustainability but adequately considering in its formulation the differences significant in countries’ governance climate. Finally, graphical relationships between DI and GI, and DI and (EII + GL) are shown, and the existence of these relationships are tested with WLS and nonparametric regressions. Our findings show that significant differences in country ranking were found; the graphical relationships are empirically proven; and countries with a worse GI have been further penalized in the SDI(g) ranking.
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Copyright © 2024
Scalamonti. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use and distribution provided that the original work is properly cited.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Cite this Article
Scalamonti, F. (2024). The Sustainable Development Index: An Integration of the Ecological Framework Considering the Governance-development Nexus. Highlights of Sustainability, 3(4), 354–373. https://doi.org/10.54175/hsustain3040020
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