Sustainable Development Goals Diagnostics: An Application of Network Theory and Complexity Measures to Set Country Priorities

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Quantifying the coherence of development policy priorities

“…The dots denote the presence of a link between two policy issues (nodes), and their weights are described with a gray-scale (darker means more weight). The fact that the dots above the diagonal are not a mirror image of the dots below it shows that the influence of many indicators runs in one specific direction (contrary to the co-occurrence methodology presented in El-Maghrabi et al (2018)). The dots that are distant from the diagonal indicate that there is a considerable number of connections between pillars.…”

“…For instance, interdependency networks are frequently estimated by pooling data from several countries. In some cases, the pooled sample consists of countries with radically different structures (Ceriani and Gigliarano, 2016;Cinicioglu et al, 2017;Czyżewska and Mroczek, 2014;El-Maghrabi et al, 2018). In others, countryspecific networks are derived (with a few tweaks) from a 'master' network that was previously built for analyzing other countries (Pedercini and Barney, 2010).…”

Understanding the Cost of Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

“…The WBG has developed an SDG benchmarking and projection framework that has been applied to well over 16 countries (Gable, Lofgren, and Osorio-Rodarte 2015). This framework has been updated to benchmark countries in the areas of data, finance, and attainment of the SDGs (Amin-Salem et al 2018) and has recently been complemented by a framework that allows for additional prioritization using network analysis (El-Maghrabi et al 2018…”

Quantifying the Coherence of Development Policy Priorities

“…This is the case, for example, of network-based studies. Here, cross-national data are pooled in order to estimate spill-overs between different policies (Ceriani & Gigliarano, 2016;Cinicioglu, Ulusoy, Ekici, Ülengin, & Ülengin, 2017;Czyżewska & Mroczek, 2014;El-Maghrabi, Gable, Rodarte, & Verbeek, 2018).…”