Evaluation of Countries' Sustainable Development Performances Using Hybrid Lopcow-Piv Techniques

Abstract

With the changing world conditions, many environmental and social risks have preceded economic risks. Accordingly, many economic variables have begun to be evaluated together with the concept of sustainability. Undoubtedly, the most important and inclusive of these is sustainable development. It has emerged as a necessity to evaluate the concepts of development and growth for economies and whether they are sustainable. The aim of this study is to analyze the sustainable development performance of countries. For the present purpose, performance evaluation was made on a total of eight criteria, including environmental, social, governance, financial and economic, which are thought to be effective on the sustainability performance of countries. 167 countries whose data can be accessed for the year 2020 were included in the analysis. In the study, the LOPCOW (Logarithmic Percentage Change-driven Objective Weighting) method was used to determine the importance levels of the eight criteria. PIV (Proximity Indexed Value) method was used to rank the sustainable development performances of the countries. The results revealed that Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Ireland are the countries with the best sustainable development performance. It has been deduced that besides economic indicators, other factors such as environmental, social, and management performances are important in measuring the sustainable development performance of countries.