Measurement of the Importance of 11 Sustainable Development Criteria: How Do the Important Criteria Differ among Four Asian Countries and Shift as the Economy Develops ?

Tasaki T., Tajima R., Kameyama Y.
2021.10.18

Information of Paper

Measurement of the Importance of 11 Sustainable Development Criteria: How Do the Important Criteria Differ among Four Asian Countries and Shift as the Economy Develops ?

Authors: Tasaki T., Tajima R., Kameyama Y.
Year: 2021
Journal: Sustainability 2021, 13(17), 9719

Keywords

Sustainability criteria, National target, Country development stage, Indirect stated preference, Sustainable development goals (SDGs)

Abstract

Understanding the criteria underlying development in a country is crucial to formulating developmental plans. However, it is not always clear which criteria are more important than others in different countries and at different times. The relationship between developmental criteria and the stage of economic development is also unclear in many countries. Therefore, we devised an indirect stated preference approach for the measurement of the importance of developmental criteria and employed it in four Asian countries—Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam—to measure the importance of sustainable development (SD) criteria perceived by the general public. Specifically, we evaluated the importance of 58 national goals linked to 1 of 11 SD criteria. Security, efficiency, accessibility, capability, and environmental capacity were perceived as relatively important by respondents in all four countries(Fig.1). The respondents perceived that the currently important criteria would be important in the future as well (Fig. 2). The order of the importance in each country differed. For example, environmental capacity was ranked lower, and inclusiveness was ranked higher as the gross domestic product of a country increased. Thai and Vietnamese respondents had similar perceptions and, overall, tended to have higher levels of importance than South Korean and Japanese respondents, who also had similar perceptions of importance (Fig.1).


Fig.1 Standardized importance ranks of the 11 SD criteria in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. Criteria ranked in top five for at least one country are presented. Per capita gross domestic product (GDP, PPP based) in 2014 is also shown.
Environmental capacity is ranked lower, and inclusiveness is ranked higher as the GDP per capita of a country increases.
Fig.2 Standardized current and relative future importance values of 11 SD criteria in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Of the four quadrants, the upper right quadrant includes criteria that are important at present and in the future.