Measuring Sustainable Development: A Weighting Approach to Sustainable Development Indicators

The concept of sustainable development, in recent years if not decades, has been introduced into all individual forms of development regardless of sector or economy. It has been realized internationally that when development does not become sustainable it will soon cease to exist. In previous years, there have been attempts to measure development and sustainability mainly by the United Nations but also by many scholars. This process resulted in the construction of 50 main and 46 secondary indicators for sustainable development in 2007, which differ from the indicators that determine the percentage of achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals as set in 2015. In previous works (Panagiotopoulos et al. 2022) an attempt was made to categorize the 96 Sustainable Development indicators of the U.N. according to Maslow's pyramid of needs and Bossel's indicator categories. With this combination, the pyramid of sustainable development was formed, in which the individual indicators are distributed. The purpose of this categorization was to investigate the contribution of certain economic aspects of human life to sustainable development based on the individual indicators as well as its extent within the categories of the pyramid. Schematically, the pyramid assists in visualizing the contribution to sustainable development of the subject being examined. From the above correlation and the corresponding categorization, an attempt is made to give weight to each indicator with the ultimate goal of creating a matrix of performance of specific scores for the objects under consideration, always in relation to sustainable development. It is reported that the specific way of scoring differs from the way of measuring states’ sustainable development according to the United Nations (U.N. 2022).