Are Social, Economic and Environmental Well-Being Equally Important in all Countries Around the World? A Study by Income Levels

The main objective of this paper was to see whether different countries around the world show differences in their sustainability levels as captured in the indicators from the Sustainable Society Index (SSI, Van de Kerk and Manuel in Ecol Econ 66:228–242, 2012) according to their level of income. To do so, the X-STATIS and CO-STATIS multivariate techniques were employed. With these methods, our sample of 151 countries and 21 indicators can be jointly represented along four time periods. The results obtained permit us to visualize that the groups of countries by income levels show differences in some of the variables from the SSI, because of the lack of proximities between those variables and the countries. Moreover, with the X-STATIS technique, the possible evolution of the countries or indicators over time can be represented, and with CO-STATIS, the relations between the social, economic and environmental aspects can be shown as well. From our results we were able to deduce that, on the one hand, social and economic indicators, such as Public Debt or Employment, are associated with countries having high and upper-middle incomes, for example, Chile, Israel, Malta, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Spain, Portugal, France, Poland and Czech Republic. On the other hand, countries with low and lower-middle incomes are more associated with environmental issues. Also, after finding that the differences between the countries by income levels are mainly caused by the economic indicators, we carried out two CO-STATIS analyses, one for social and economic variables, and the other for economic and environmental variables. These findings led us to deduce that, generally, the social and economic indicators are not related to each other, nor are the economic indicators related to the environmental ones. However, for some of the countries individually both relations may be possible.