Spatio‐temporal analysis of economic, social, and environmental issues in the framework of sustainable development in worldwide countries

Sustainability indicators make it possible to clearly and effectively show the general public the position of different countries with respect to sustainability, to assist governments in decision‐making concerning social, environmental, and economic strategies, and to approve plans and tactics. Sustainability is now an important global issue. So many institutions are facing the challenge of building new mathematical models and developing algorithms that can confirm that we are making progress towards a more sustainable society. Given the current dearth of such methods, we thought it would be valuable to develop a new system for use in the study of sustainability, a system that will help to explain the effects of each country, describing sustainability through the use of several indicators. The Sustainable Society Index is used in the present research for the period 2006–2012. The co‐Tucker3 method is used to describe interactions between the rows, columns, and repetitions of two sequences of matrices, by reducing their dimensionality, that is, the number of elements in them. Plots are used to visualise differences or similarities in the data, for example, groups of countries that score differently on some indicators during some years, relationships between indicators, and temporal trends. Thus, our methodology makes it possible to deduce relationships among countries and temporal trends based on sustainability indicator data.