Benchmarking OECD countries’ sustainable development performance: A goal-specific principal component analysis approach

This paper proposes a framework to assess the status of sustainable development performance of OECD countries towards reaching the 2030 agenda based on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Each SDG addresses a critical area of sustainable development and is represented with several social, economic, or environmental indicators. As a result of data collection efforts, 17 SDGs are represented with total of over 90 variables following the guidance of United Nation’s (UN) recent reports. Using such a high number of variables to create a benchmark score for each of the 35 OECD countries is a challenging and complex task due to the degree of correlation among the indicators and unit of measurement differences. To cope with these challenges, we proposed a Goal-Specific Principal Component Analysis (GS-PCA) approach and compared statistically with the UN reports for experimental validation purpose. It was found that SDG1 No Poverty, SDG7 Affordable and Clean Energy, SDG11 Sustainable Cities and Communities, SDG17 Partnerships to Achieve the Goal and the group mean of 17 SDGs were found to be improving. On the other hand, SDG4 Quality Education and SDG8 Decent Work and Economic Growth were in decline. The highest performance was observed in SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth (78.06) and the lowest performance was observed in SDG 17 Partnerships to Achieve the Goal (29.93). In addition, substantial differences were observed in the scores and ranks of mediocre and poor performing countries compared to the benchmark reports, while both the results of this study and benchmark reports were found to be strongly positively correlated. •OECD countries’ sustainable development performance was investigated.•A Goal-specific Principal Component Analysis approach was proposed.•Majority of sustainable development goals were not found to be improving.•The highest performance was observed in SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth (78.06).•The lowest performance was observed in SDG 17 Partnerships to Achieve the Goal (29.93).