INSTITUTIONS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: A CROSS-COUNTRY ANALYSIS

The relationship between institutional quality and sustainable development?; in all its three connected dimensions - economic, social, environmental - is widely discussed at the decision making level and in the specialized literature, with some contradictory opinions among researchers. This paper aims at investigating the relationship between institutions and sustainable development in a cross-country analysis, on a sample of 132 countries around the world, which were grouped in clusters based on the similarities between them regarding the values of the three dimensions of sustainable development. The three dimensions of sustainable development are captured with GDP per capita for the economic dimension, the Human Development Index for the social dimension and Environmental Quality for the environmental dimension. The institutional status of the countries considered in the analysis is measured with the six Governance Indicators released by the World Bank. In all countries, despite differences in terms of development or geo-political context, sustainable development represents an option which is generally taken into account. The differences in terms of implementation are determined by the level of available resources and by the efficiency of their management at the central level. We may talk about a certain "normalcy" of institutional conditions, which represents a common denominator of sustainability.