Assessment of Social Sustainability Using Social Society Index: A Clustering Application

Abstract

With the massive economic development and vast environmental degradation over the last decade, "sustainability" and "sustainable development" have become primary concepts in governments" agenda. Sustainability has three pillars, namely environmental, economic and social, the latter gaining attention relatively later than the others. Some organizations evaluate the world countries for social sustainability using indices such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Better Life Index, Human Development Index and Social Society Index (SSI). SSI is used to rank world countries and evaluate their level of sustainability. SSI is a scoring system developed by Social Society Foundation to measure human wellbeing, environmental wellbeing and economic wellbeing every 2 years. In the evaluation process, SSI calculates scores using 21 indicators and publishes the actual situation on sustainability, progress over time and differences in development per region and per income class. In this paper, human wellbeing indicators of SSI are used to cluster world countries with k-means algorithm to assess social sustainability. Human wellbeing indicators are grouped into basic needs, personal development and health, and well-balanced society, all of which are measured with 3 indicators. The clusters obtained are compared with SSI rankings and the results are elaborated.

The Role of Education and Income Inequality on Environmental Quality: A Panel Data Analysis of the EKC Hypothesis on OECD Countries

“…The use of socio-economic indicators to aggregate countries or regions and evaluate comparative performances has been considered in the literature. For example, the clustering of more than 150 countries based on Human Well-Being indicators of the Social Society Indices has been used [59,63], while composite indicators to generate a ranking of EU countries according to their sustainability in terms of lifestyle, environment, and social issues have also been calculated [64].…”

The Role of Education and Income Inequality on Environmental Quality. A Panel Data Analysis of the EKC Hypothesis on OECD Countries

“…This approach allows to partition the countries according to their cross-sectional distances obtaining groups of countries which share a "common evolutionary path" of income inequality. The use (Akan & Selam, 2018;Hao et al, 2016), while composite indicators of sustainability to generate a ranking of EU-countries according to their sustainability in terms of life-style, environment and social issues has also been calculated (Luzzati & Gucciardi, 2015).…”

The impact of globalization on regional marketing

“…Mutual interaction between all entities and mechanisms occurs on all hierarchical levels within the process of development. With the massive economic development and vast environmental degradation over the last decade, "sustainability" and "sustainable development" have become primary concepts in governments"agenda [15].This includes the influence of strong mechanisms, that are often times hard to predict and also have unpredictable consequences. Current views on regional development stress the effects of spontaneous processes and their management through regulatory mechanisms.…”