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Sustainable nations: what do aggregate indexes tell us?

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Abstract

What is a ‘sustainable nation’ and how can we identify and rank ‘sustainable nations?’ Are nations producing and consuming in a sustainable way? Although several aggregate indexes have been proposed to answer such questions, comprehensive and internationally comparable data are not available for most of these. This paper quantitatively compares three aggregate indexes of sustainability: the World Bank’s ‘Genuine Savings’ measure, the ‘Ecological Footprint,’ and the ‘Environmental Sustainability Index.’ These three indexes are available for a large number of countries and also seem to be the most influential among the aggregate indexes. This paper first discusses the main limitations and weaknesses of each of these indexes. Subsequently, it shows that rankings of sustainable nations and aggregate assessments of unsustainable world population and world GDP shares vary considerably among these indexes. This disagreement leads to suggestions for analysis and policy. One important insight is that climate change, arguable the most serious threat currently faced by humanity, is not or arbitrarily captured by the indexes.

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Notes

  1. The Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) has also developed an index known as Environmental Performance Index (EPI) which is suggested to supplement ESI. While ESI is a measure of a country’s long-term environmental trajectory, the EPI focuses on a country’s present environmental performance (see YCELP et al. (2008)). The focus of EPI is thus narrower. As the aim of our paper is to examine indexes of ‘sustainability’ we consider only comprehensive ones like EF, GS, and ESI, and do not include EPI.

  2. Kendall tau_b is a non-parametric correlation coefficient which delivers a more accurate generalization than Spearman’s coefficient of correlation when the data set contain many tied ranks.

  3. Data are collected from a variety of sources: GS from the World Bank (2007); EF from the Living Planet Report (WWF et al. 2006); ESI from YCELP et al. (2005); and HDI from the Human Development Report 2006 (UNDP 2006).

  4. Economies are divided into income groups according to gross national income (GNI) per capita, calculated using the World Bank Atlas method. The groups are: low income countries (LICs), $765 or less; lower middle income countries (LMICs), $766–3,035; upper middle income countries (UMICs), $3,036–9385; and high income countries (HICs), $9,386 or more (World Bank 2005). The Human Development Report 2005 (UNDP 2005) classifies countries into three clusters: high human development (HDI is 0.8 or above), medium human development (HDI is 0.5 to 0.799), and low human development (HDI is less than 05).

  5. These 11 countries are out of a subset of 119 countries for which values of all three indexes are available. Countries included in the study are those for which at least one of the index values is available (the most recent values of the indexes are used: GS is available for 128 countries, EF for 147 countries and ESI for 146 countries). Thus the number of unsustainable nations by all three indexes can be much higher than 11, if data on all three indexes are available for more than 119 nations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Business, Economics and Policy Studies, University of Brunei Darussalam, BE1410, Gadong, Brunei Darussalam

    J. Ram Pillarisetti

  2. ICREA, Barcelona, Spain

    Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh

  3. Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh

  4. Department of Economics and Economic History, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh

  5. Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh

  6. Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh

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  1. J. Ram Pillarisetti
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  2. Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh
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Correspondence to J. Ram Pillarisetti.

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Pillarisetti, J.R., van den Bergh, J.C.J.M. Sustainable nations: what do aggregate indexes tell us?. Environ Dev Sustain 12, 49–62 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-008-9179-7

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