Rank dynamics and club convergence of sustainable development for countries around the world

Assessment of country-level sustainable development is a critical research topic entrenched in the global battle against climate change. This study employs the frontier approach, combined with convergence analysis, to assess the sustainable development for a set of 121 countries over 1990-2014, focusing on analyzing the countries' rank dynamics and convergence behavior. The levels of the countries' sustainable development are captured by data envelopment analysis, a nonparametric frontier approach that can jointly assess a country's economic and environmental performance. Reflecting the divergent views on the importance of economic and environmental objectives in the pursuit of sustainability, the proposed approach generates the countries' sustainability scores by prioritizing either economic or environmental criterion. This study finds that developed countries have significantly outperformed developing countries if environmental criterion takes precedence over economic criterion in performance assessment. Moreover, regardless of the model employed, there is strong evidence of club convergence, i.e., convergence in subgroups of countries to different steady states rather than convergence in full sample. We analyze the pattern of convergence paths and discuss policy implications obtained from our empirical findings. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.