Towards the 2030 Agenda: Measuring the Progress of the European Union Countries through the SDGs Achievement Index

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity. The success or failure in their implementation largely depends on the national implementation effort, measured within wide and compound indicator frameworks. Due to such complexity, providing a simple but comprehensive view on the progress to achieve the SDGs is a priority. Moreover, the measure of the progress allows the consistency among the different dimensions of sustainable development to be assessed. The purpose of this work is to evaluate the results accomplished by European Union Countries in achieving SDGs. In particular, the paper proposed the SDGs achievement index (SDG-AI), a multicriteria-based index, including six different dimensions and applied to EU countries. The SDG-AI allows the differences across the EU countries to be highlighted, and also assesses the contribution of the different dimensions to the final result. The use of such an index will also be useful to understand the effect of the pandemic on the development.

The Paradoxes of the SGDs from the Sustainable Development Report

“…The starting point in our research was the Sustainable Development Report 2022, from the analysis of which we observed a series of paradoxes both between the results of the SDG Index and between the results presented in this report and those presented by other researchers (i.e., Horan, 2020;Puertas and Bermúdez, 2020;Wang et al, 2020;Rocchi et al, 2022;Taajamaa et al, 2022).…”

“…Our methodology consists of a critical analysis of literature starting from the Sustainable Development Report 2022, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the representative work of relevant scholars (i.e., Hwang and Yoon, 1981;Bravo, 2014;Costanza et al, 2016;Dhaoui, 2018;Ding et al, 2018;Burlea-Schiopoiu, 2019;Horan, 2020;Puertas and Bermúdez, 2020;Wang et al, 2020;Rocchi et al, 2022;Sachs et al, 2022;Taajamaa et al, 2022).…”

“…The differences in sustainable development across the EU countries determined Rocchi et al (2022) 2022) changed the indicators and eliminated the subdimensions at the same time as changing the aggregation algorithm using the TOPSIS method for aggregating criteria (Hwang and Yoon, 1981).…”

“…The EU Baltic countries and the former Eastern bloc countries are at the opposite pole. Therefore, the main recommendations are for countries with sustainable development problems to elaborate and implement a strategy for improving all dimensions, especially the Equality dimension (mainly gender equality, immigrant inclusion, and income distribution (Rocchi et al, 2022). Source: Authors adapted from Sachs et al, 2022, pp.…”

Untitled

“…However, Sweden's attainments outlined in Agenda 2030 were always between average and the best, placing Sweden as the country that made the most significant progress towards SDGs during the period of 2015-2018. Rocchi et al (2022) presented the evolution of an existing sustainability index in order to measure the progress of EU countries towards the achievement of the objectives of Agenda 2030. They proposed the Sustainable Development Goals Achievement Index (SDG-AI), which represents all the sustainability-related information.…”