A New Method for the Quantitative Assessment of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and a Case Study on Central Asia

Abstract

Regarding the sustainable development goals (SDGs) formulated by the United Nations (UN), how to effectively measure, assess and compare the progress and trends of these SDGs in different countries was the problem we wanted to address. Based on past quantitative assessments, this paper proposed a new methodological framework for SDG assessment and analysis, and used two typical Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as the sample area to test the framework. Our study chose 209 indicators and indicator sets, including 429 specific indicators and collected relevant indicator data for the two countries from 2000 to 2017, then proposed a new direction for the unification of indicator data as well as methods for normalization. Afterward, the scores of each goal and SDG performance were calculated. This analysis was also done innovatively using the Chow Test to conduct further analysis of the SDG performance. According to the assessment, over those 18 years, Kyrgyzstan’s SDGs had been performing poorly, especially the economic SDGs, while the performance of Kazakhstan’s SDGs had remained in constant fluctuation. It could be said that the SDG performance in Central Asia as a whole was not very optimistic. It required the devotion of greater efforts in the gathering of different types of indicator data because there were still gaps in data collection between countries as well as the missing of time-series data, which could challenge the indicator selection and further restrict the follow-up assessment and analysis. The assessment framework presented in this paper can be applied for assessing the long-term performance of national SDGs of different countries, helping analyze the internal relationship dynamic among and within countries, underscoring specific issues of sustainable development, assessing policy and selecting development models and directions.

Assessment model of regions’ economy in the context of their sustainable development

“…The analysis of publications [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] showed a variety of methodological approaches to assess sustainable development, which is determined by the identified goals to obtain evaluations. At the same time, most of the methodological approaches involve to calculate a composite (integrated, comprehensive) index of sustainable development based on the use of additive or multiplicative convolution.…”

“…The experience of foreign scholars in solving the problems of sustainable development assessment is presented in [11][12][13][14][15][16]. In particular, paper [11] presents the author's methodology for assessing sustainable development for the Czech Republic according to four components: Political area, Social area, Economic area and Environmental area, which uses 101 output indicators and provides for the calculation of a hierarchical integral index system, which includes 12 partial indicators, 4 partial composite indicators and one aggregate integrated index of sustainable development.…”

“…Studies [14][15][16] have presented approaches for assessing the degree of achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals identified in [1] in a case of Asian countries.…”

Evaluation of Sustainable Development in European Union Countries

“…Lim et al [20], Sachs et al [21][22][23][24], Clark and Kavanagh [25,26], Fullman et al [27], Campagnolo et al [28], and Huan et al [29] produce different frameworks, with different numbers of indicators, to assess all or a part of the SDGs formulated by the United Nations. It should be pointed out that the European Union (EU) has produced its own indicator set to monitor progress towards the SDG established by the United Nations in 2015.…”

Development of Methodology and Assessment of Ecological Safety of the EAEU and CIS Regions in the Context of Sustainable Development

“…The issue of keeping low housing prices in eco-cities is the most worrisome (Medved et al 2020). In the countries of Central Asia, only the environmental component of the SD goals is developed enough (Huan et al 2019). In China, positive environmental changes are associated with technological progress despite the low environmental efficiency of most large cities, the majority of which are socially and economically developed (Long 2021).…”