The Possible Effects of National Culture Dimensions on Sustainable Child Development Index: A Cross-Country Analysis of Countries

Abstract

Household income, which is one of the most important measures of a country’s economic state, does not indicate that children live in better circumstances. In the related literature, children are placed at the center of a country’s sustainability assessments and created the Sustainable Child Development Index (SCDI), which displays a country’s sustainable child development scores in terms of health, education, safety, economic conditions, and environmental factors. Taking into consideration the issues about children and SCDI, this study is to reveal the effects of Hofstede’s cultural structures/dimensions on SCDI scores by analyzing a cross-sectional data set of 81 countries with logarithmic multiple regression as an explanatory model. As a result of the analysis, it was seen that power distance and masculinity had a significant and negative effect on SCDI, and long-term orientation had a significant and positive effect on SCDI. For future studies, this study can be beneficial to see the longitudinal differences for the countries covered in this study.