Measuring sustainable development: Linear regression approach

Sustainable development (SD) is a multi-aspect and complicated concept, and measuring it requires many data from a wide range of indicators. Due to the difficulty of assessing the SD index, this paper aimed to develop a method for measuring SD using the regression method and the data available in other global reports. To this end, for each aspect of SD, i.e., social, economic and environmental aspects, a global report including the human development index, the global competitiveness index, and the environmental performance index was selected and the data of the reports in 2016 were extracted. A collinearity test showed that the indices were not suitable to create regression models. Therefore, sub-indices of each index were used and the variables and coefficients of regression models were determined. The results showed that the accuracy of regression models for the data of 2016 and 2018 was approximately 95 and 90%, respectively, and the most important aspect in SD was the social aspect. Copyright © 2019 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.