What makes an island a Small Island Developing State or SIDS? There is no universally agreed definition, so what are the characteristics that single out these islands from the thousands of others? The variety of classifications being used by the United Nations and other International Organisations suggests that the label Small - Island - Developing – States does not adequately describe those characteristics. This article investigates what those characteristics might be and whether a criteria-based classification for Small Island Developing States is feasible.

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The 2030 Agenda and accompanying Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are vital in guiding national and global policy. However, many of the SDG indicators used to measure progress toward those goals suffer from long publication lags. Nowcasting has the potential to address this problem and generate more timely estimates of those indicators. This paper provides resources for achieving that potential by 1) carrying out a comprehensive nowcasting feasibility survey of all SDG indicators to assess their potential to be nowcast, and 2) performing a case study of indicator 9.4.1 to illustrate and shed light on the process of performing a nowcasting exercise. There exist 231 SDG indicators, but due to only examining Tier 1 indicators and the fact that many indicators have multiple sub-indicators, 362 indicators and sub-indicators were eventually surveyed. Of those 362, 150 were found highly likely to be suitable candidates for nowcasting, 87 were found to be likely, and 125 were found to be unsuitable.

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This paper presents a comparative study of selected global gender inequality indices: The Global Gender Gap Index (GGI); the Gender Inequality Index (GII); and the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI). A Principal Component Analysis approach is used to identify the most important factors or dimensions, such as, health, social conditions and education, economic and labour participation and political empowerment that impact on gender and drive gender inequality. These factors are compared with the Sustainable Development Goal targets to assess how well they align. The findings show that while economic participation and empowerment are significant factors of gender equality, they are not fully incorporated into gender equality indices. In this context, the paper also discusses the absence of international trade, a key driver of economic development, from the gender equality measures and makes some tentative recommendations for how this lacuna might be addressed.