Sustainability performance of countries matters: A non parametric index
Abstract Tracking consumers' expectation, researchers' concentration, practitioners' competition, and governments' legislation, we observe increasing interests in incorporating sustainability initiatives into managerial decision making. Sustainability development centers on how to achieve balance among economic, environmental, and social objectives of involved stakeholders in the process of value creation. This paper focuses on the macro level performance measurement of countries through a sustainability conscious lens. Our methodological objective is to develop a non parametric frontier model in the presence of undesirable integer valued indicators which constructs a nationwide sustainability composite index. Particularly, a super efficiency formulation is investigated which enables us to differentiate between equally efficient entities. From an empirical perspective, we apply the proposed model to a case study assessing the sustainability productivity of 133 countries. Our computational results demonstrate that conventional metrics commonly used globally to reflect the sustainability performance of governments may mislead decision makers. We, however, design a more comprehensive platform to benchmark the country level productivity against all triple aspect of sustainability development. Accordingly, the proposed index permits valid inference by accounting for environmental measures and social aspects.
Journal of Cleaner Production