Environment, Development and Sustainability

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-019-00489-z

Differentiating countries based on the sustainable

development proximities using the SDG indicators

Mehdi Jabbari1 · Majid Shafiepour Motlagh1 · Khosro Ashrafi1 · Ghahreman Abdoli2

Received: 22 December 2018 / Accepted: 9 October 2019

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract
For the years of 2017 and 2018, the Sustainable Development Goals index (SDG index)
includes around 80 global indicators for more than 150 parties (countries) to the United
Nations, which makes it a very comprehensive multidimensional composite index for
assessing their sustainable development (SD) achievement rates. As would be observed
in the present study, when the comparison between countries on their progresses in well-
being and economy is desirable, gathering indicators of both environmental and develop-
ment pillars of the SD as performed in the SDG index construction can be misleading.
Based on the SDG index and with the aim of better monitoring and assessing countries’
SD levels, the current study introduces a composite index called DEVI which merely con-
sists of the “development goals indicators.” The DEVI showed a high correlation with the
human development index. The lack of separation between the developed and developing
countries in the SDGs is a disadvantage especially when various interactions with differ-
ent countries are considered according to their different development levels. In this regard,
by innovating a combined statistics-based algorithm, compatible with the available con-
ventional lists for developed countries, countries are classified based on the similarities in
their DEVI scores into the developed and developing countries. Applying this algorithm,
it determined 43 and 40 countries as developed countries in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

Keywords  SDG index · Sustainable Development Goals · Developed countries ·

Development levels

1 Introduction

Historically, the human societies confronted with many global issues that dealing with
them required multinational actions. To this goal, one necessary action for increasing the
effectiveness of efforts would be understanding each nation’s different needs in order to
diversify efforts based on the differences (Lamont and Favor 2017). Therefore, each nation

* Majid Shafiepour Motlagh

shafiepour@ut.ac.ir; shafiepourm@yahoo.com
1
Department of Environmental Engineering, School of Environment, College of Engineering,
University of Tehran, Qods St., Enghelab Ave., Tehran, Iran
2
Faculty of Economics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

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 M. Jabbari et al.

may better be treated based on its unique qualities and circumstances. It is ideal, but when
a level of cooperation between distinguished nations is required, grouping these diversi-
fied members of international society is somewhat a toleration to make a trade-off between
nations’ differences and resemblances. Besides, grouping also helps to amplify the political
power of cooperation and reduce prejudice (Kymlicka 2001).
The notion of development is considered to be among the non-explicit ones. However, it
usually just referred to such economic growth and more specifically to economic product,
income and their derivatives and presented by some indices such as gross national income
(GNI), gross national product (GNP) and gross domestic product (GDP). Especially after
Bretton Woods, the GDP became the louder sound of development (Dickinson 2011).
Using these mostly economic indicators to describe improvements in life quality and devel-
opment has a lot of critics (Stiglitz et al. 2010; Lequiller and Blades 2004).
During the recent decades, many efforts have been made to define the other noneco-
nomic indices for the development concept. The HDI is a well-known successful result
of such efforts, including the life expectancy and education further to the gross national
income (GNI). For a brief description of HDI, the reader is referred to García Aguña and
Kovacevic (2010), Qiu et al. (2018), Sen and Anand (1994) and Gasper et al. (2013). The
Youth Development Index (YDI), Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), Inequality-Adjusted
HDI (IHDI), Happy Planet Index (HPI) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) Better Life Index (BLI) are other instances of these efforts. The
increase in the number of human development (HD) aspects which were included in such
development indices obviously can raise both sensitivity (number of developing countries
which correctly can be identified by index) and specificity (number of correctly identified
developed countries) of the test (Okeh and Okoro 2012), but two major deficiencies can
be found in HDI and similar indices: firstly, the absence of many aspects of the HD and
secondly, the different methods of their construction, including the data collecting, normal-
izing, rescaling, weighting and indicators aggregating. This lack of uniformity especially in
the indicators weighting makes the subject more controversial, while comparing and rank-
ing countries based on these development indices are desired. Several studies have been
conducted in order to solve some of these issues; see Abayomi and Pizarro (2013), Morse
(2003), Noorbakhsh (1998) and Ravallion (2012).
When the aim is to share some utilities between nations based on their differences and
circumstances (for instance their distinct level of development), any lack of the comprehen-
sive evaluation can reduce the credibility of the provided criterion. Besides, the involve-
ment of the different tastes in an index construction will also have a negative impact on the
probability of the global consensus and effectiveness of the international cooperation, as a
consequence. For more information about this, one is referred to Konow (2003) and Lac-
zniak and Murphy (2008).
While the concept of the SD suffers to some extent from the uncertainty (Hopwood
et  al. 2005), it provides the most comprehensive effort for incorporating the different
aspects of the HD. As a certain definition, one can rely on “the Brundtland Report” in 1987
by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) which suggests that
SD can be stated as an attempt to link development and the environment (World Commis-
sion on Environment and Development 1987), and in a pragmatic step, achieving the SDGs
is assumed as the SD.
To address one major difference between the SDGs and the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs), that is, the elimination of distinction criteria between developed and devel-
oping countries (UN 2015), in this study, it has been attempted to provide an innovative
mechanism for grouping/differentiating societies into developed and developing countries

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Differentiating countries based on the sustainable development…

according to their SD levels. SDG index will be used as the indicator of countries’ develop-
ment of course, after applying several modifications. Then, using such statistical tools, the
classification of developing countries has been performed on the basis of their SD levels, in
order to be able to enhance cooperation in solving the global problems.

2 The SDGs and the SDG index

There exist complexities in recognizing the SD meaning due to its multidisciplinary nature
(Basiago 1995). In September 2015 and in continuation of the MDGs, the SDGs were
introduced and 193 UN member states that are involved in the SDGs make it the most
comprehensively offered framework to talk about the notion of development (UN 2014).
The SDGs in their recent form are a universal set of goals, targets and indicators that
must be achieved by the year 2030. Currently, they comprise of 17 goals and 169 targets.
Goals 1–11 and Goal 16 are mostly socioeconomic development-related goals (hereinaf-
ter referred to as DEVs), and Goals 12–15 are environmental-related goals (hereinafter
referred to as ENVs). Goal 17 which emphasizes the need for international partnership,
in essence, is an overarching goal providing the means of implementation of all other 16
goals. There are also 232 indicators under the 169 targets, endorsed by the United Nations
Statistical Commission since April 2017. However, the availability of such indicators for
each of the UN member states remains an absolute challenge (United Nations Statistics
Division 2017).

2.1 The SDG index

Despite the many superiorities of the SDGs over other provided development concepts,
especially its comprehensiveness, without a procedurally well-designed conceptual indi-
cator framework for selecting and/or designing indicators, the results of SDG assessment
may be ambiguous and confusing (Hák et al. 2016).
Several reports for monitoring the implementation of the SDGs have been provided
since 2015, such as the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2017 (United Nations
2017), Sustainable Development in the European Union (Eurostat 2017) and the SDG
Index and Dashboards Report 2017 (Sachs et  al. 2017a). In comparison with the others,
the latter has some superiority especially in country coverage, broader users and provided
interpretations. A good analysis of these major efforts has been presented by Janoušková
et al. (2018).
Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) pub-
lished a useful collection of available indicators from 2016 yearly. The SDG Index and
Dashboards Report 2017, at times called “SDG Report 2017,” involves 99 SD indicators.
Two main requirements for a country to be covered by SDG Report 2017 are (with some
exceptions) having at least one million of inhabitants and availability of data for at least
80% of SDG indicators, so 157 countries from 193 UN member states have been included
in SDG Report 2017 (Sachs et al. 2017a).
A major achievement published in SDG Report 2017 is consideration of three main
groups of international spillover effects which are environmental spillovers, spillovers
related to economics and finance and finally the security spillovers. Considering these

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 M. Jabbari et al.

spillovers clearly cancels out some of the negative effects of most developed countries on
the least one (Sachs et al. 2017a).

2.2 Bertelsmann Stiftung and SDSN method for construction of SDG index

During the construction of the SDG index, several tests have been conducted on the indica-
tors such as skewness, kurtosis, Shapiro–Wilk and Shapiro–Francia. For more details about
the composite indices construction, the reader is referred to Nardo et al. (2005). It is neces-
sary to rescale the indicators prior to their aggregation. To this aim, the upper and lower
bounds of each indicator should be defined. For example, the upper bound for the indica-
tors having absolute quantitative thresholds can be determined by SDGs or targets. These
thresholds have been specified in targets like zero poverty, full gender equality, etc. More
discussions about this step are presented in SDG Report (Sachs et al. 2017a).
After specifying the upper and lower bounds, rescaling to the interval (0,100) is per-
formed by using a simple linear transformation, Eq. 1, representing the worst to the best,
respectively:
I − min(I)
IR = 100 × (1)
max(I) − min(I)
where I is the raw score of each country’s indicator, min(I) and max(I) are the minimum
(the worst) and maximum (the best) scores of that indicator among all countries, respec-
tively, and IR stands for the rescaled score of each country’s indicator.
The next step is weighting the indicators for the aggregation purpose. Since the different
weights may affect countries’ performance and rank in each of the SDGs (Booysen 2002),
the process of weighting is faced with disputes. Furthermore, it can affect the countries’
policies for some indicators. To solve this issue, several solutions have been proposed. For
example, OECD introduced a kind of flexible weighting method for its BLI (as a composite
index), which allows users to arbitrarily attach weights to the indicators based on their per-
ception of the “Better Life” concept (OECD 2015).
When an organization aims to construct a composite index for monitoring and rank-
ing countries based on their performances on SDGs, this flexible weighting method cannot
be applicable on SDGs as it reduces the credibility of the results and also increases the
probability of the “cherry-picking” indicators by countries, i.e., attaching the higher weight
to the indicator on which the country is better. Therefore, a fixed-weight method which
attaches equal weights to every SDG (and its indicators) has been elected by Bertelsmann
Stiftung and SDSN. This is further in accordance with “integrated and indivisible” set of
goals which have been emphasized by UN (United Nations 2015).
Due to its maximum flexibility, the standard constant elasticity of substitution (CES)
has been selected for aggregating all the indicators, Eq. 2 (Arrow et al. 1961; Blackorby
and Donaldson 1982).
[N ]− 1
∑ 1 −𝜌 𝜌
I(N, Ij , 𝜌) = I (2)
j=1
N j

Here, I(N, Ij, ρ) is the composite index associated with each country over all of the
SDGs, N denotes the number of SDGs, and Ij is the aggregated score for each SDG of that

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Differentiating countries based on the sustainable development…

country resulted from a similar CES function which aggregates all the rescaled indicators
of each SDG. Also, ρ describes the component substitutability with each other.
There are three considerations here:

1. As assumed before, the indicators weights are identical; therefore, the changes occurred
in any one of the indicators do not matter to the SDG index, and only the amount of
change in an indicator is important.
2. The weight of each indicator in comparison with the other indicators on the other goals
is inversely proportional to the total number of the indicators considered under that goal.
3. Results of the indicators aggregation estimated the correlation coefficient to be approxi-
mately 0.98 for the arithmetic and geometric means (Sachs et al. 2017a).

Therefore, due to the simplicity in the comprehension as well as interpretation, SDG

index sacrifices sophistication in favor of transparency and the arithmetic mean approach
which has been selected as one of the special cases of CES.

3 Correction in the SDG index and introducing DEVI and ENVI

Even with the inclusion of the spillovers in the SDG index of 2017, as mentioned before,
if all the 17 SDGs’ targets are aggregated altogether, similar to the manner implemented
in the SDG index, two main problems will reduce the validity of the SDG index scores
in countries’ development assessments. Firstly, all of the 17 SDGs are not exclusively
just socioeconomic development-related goals, but achieving them all constitutes the SD
(United Nations 2014). Secondly, on the ENVs, it can be seen that except for climate vul-
nerability in SDG 13, all the other indicators are mainly present global responsibilities and
contributions to environmental issues and not purely local or national challenges (Table 1
and Fig. 1). For example “PM2.5 in urban areas” and “Improved water source” as two main
air pollution and water quality indicators are placed under SDG 11 (one of the DEVs),
respectively, and not under any of the four ENVs.
As illustrated in Fig. 2, without segregation of DEVs and ENVs during the aggrega-
tion process of SDG indicators, one major problem that may occur is that some coun-
tries which are not good at DEVs (mostly poor and least developed countries) get rela-
tively better scores in ENVs. Obviously, this cannot be considered as an improvement
achievement in SDGs because those achieved goals, ENVs will be lost with any pro-
gress in DEVs, as their achievement to ENVs is not necessarily due to their commit-
ment to the environment; rather, they cannot emit more pollutants with respect to their
development levels. Ignoring these during the indicators aggregation to a composite

Table 1  Four environmental
goals (ENVs) from the 17 SDGs
SDG 12 Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
SDG 13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
SDG 14 Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine
resources for sustainable development
SDG 15 Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terres-
trial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat
desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, and halt
biodiversity loss

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 M. Jabbari et al.

• E-waste
• Wastewater treated
• Production-based SO2 emissions
• Nitrogen production footprint SDG12
• Net imported emissions of reactive nitrogen
• Non-recyled municipal solid waste
• Muncipal solid waste
• CO2 emissions from energy
• Imported CO2 emissions, tech-adjusted
SDG13
• Climate vulnerability
• Effective Carbon Rate

• Marine sites, mean protected area

• Ocean Health Index - Biodiversity
• Ocean Health Index - Clean waters SDG14
• Ocean Health Index - Fisheries
• Fish stocks overexpoilted or collapsed

• Terrrestrial sites, mean protected area

• Freshwater sites, mean protectec area
• Red List Index of species survival SDG15
• Annual change in forest area
• Imported biodiversity impacts

Fig. 1  Indicators used in ENVs according to the SDG Report (Sachs et al. 2017a)

index may lead to an unrealistic representation of countries’ development level and their
commitment to the environmental issues. Therefore, as a modification to the SDG index
and with the aim of increasing the accuracy of this index for assessing countries’ devel-
opment level, the DEVs and ENVs indicators have been aggregated here with the same
method as SDG index, but in a separate manner. The development index (DEVI) and the
environmental index (ENVI) have been introduced as the result of this aggregation.
The idea of separating indicators of a super-aggregation to some distinct building
blocks can be found in other efforts to make more informative indices. As a well-known
index, the jointly produced 2018 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) by Yale Uni-
versity and Columbia University in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and
others has benefited from a similar philosophy. The EPI, in order to present an index
for careful measurement of environmental trends and progress, groups indicators within
the two policy objectives: environmental health and ecosystem vitality (Wendling et al.
2018).
In addition to distinguished purposes of DEVI and ENVI with EPI, there is also
another main difference between them. The EPI uses a hierarchical framework that
groups indicators within issue categories, issue categories within policy objectives and
policy objectives within the overall index (Wendling et  al. 2018), so the selection of
indicators have been done by that index presenters’ method, but in the method of con-
struction of DEVI and ENVI and in order to maximize the compatibility with SDGs,
there have been no adjustment to each of SDG indicators. Here, while each of the SDGs’
indicators remained unchanged, the development SDGs (DEVs) have been selected and

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Differentiating countries based on the sustainable development…

Fig. 2  Green, yellow, orange and red indicate the best to worst amount of SDG achievement. The gray
means that the goal is not defined for that country, reprinted from Sachs et al. (2017a). Here, the aim was
to indicate the differences in the overall trends between two groups of countries, OECD members in above
and sub-Saharan countries down. As can be seen in the two tables, for the mostly rich countries, the first
11 goals and the goal 16 are significantly better in comparison with the same goals for the second group
(mostly poor countries). For the 12th to 15th Goals (the environmental goals), the achievement of OECD
member states was worse than the sub-Saharan African countries

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 M. Jabbari et al.

their targets’ indicators have been aggregated to make the DEVI, also the environmental
SDGs (ENVs) have been selected and their targets’ indicators have been aggregated to
make the ENVI.

4 Differentiating and clustering countries

After introducing a comprehensive index for evaluating countries’ performance in both

their development and environment (DEVI and ENVI, respectively), the second main
goal in the presented research work has been to differentiate countries according to their
DEVI scores. This goal is pursued in three stages: first, introducing the concept of coun-
tries widely accepted as developed (CWAD), second, splitting countries into developed and
developing countries by implementing a combined algorithm and third, clustering develop-
ing countries based on their DEVI score proximities.

4.1 Introducing CWAD

As the innovated algorithm of this study for differentiating the developed countries from
the others needs some initial members which have formerly been recognized as developed
countries, the concept of countries widely accepted as developed (CWAD) is introduced.
The introduction of CWAD as a preparatory step for the next part of this study has been
made here using available definitions for developed countries, with some more strictness.
It can be deduced from international treaties or conventions. Here and on the basis of
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a group of
countries which have agreed to assist others in their way of development are considered to
be developed. These are also parties to the UNFCCC, namely Annex I and II parties which
include OECD members except countries with economies in transition (EIT).
For countries, to enter easily into the list of CWAD is not desirable; rather, it is a very
controversial issue. Especially for a country being next to the developed countries, it means
having more responsibilities for that country which was assumed by many as appropriate
approaches to justice and fairness, such as Rawls theory (Okereke and Dooley 2010; Milne
1986; Sen 1982; Rawls 1971) for an illustrative example of such approaches, see Jabbari
et  al. (2019). Therefore, adopting a strict approach with the aim of reducing conflict as
much as possible, countries with emerging economies have been excluded from the list of
CWAD. This approach initially restricts the list of developed countries, but using the com-
bined criterion algorithm as described in the next section, the restriction will be compen-
sated in the final list. Table 2 shows the full list of CWAD.

Table 2  List of countries widely

accepted as developed (CWAD) Australia Germany Norway
Austria Iceland Portugal
Belgium Ireland Poland
Canada Italy Spain
Denmark Japan Sweden
Finland The Netherlands UK
France New Zealand USA

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Differentiating countries based on the sustainable development…

4.2 Introducing the combined criterion algorithm (CCA)

Here, a non-hierarchical clustering known as K-means method has been selected as the
statistical clustering method. This method originally comes from the signal processing,
which is simple to apply, fast and very common method for data clustering. For more
details about K-means method, refer to Kassambara (2017), and for the other clustering
methods, refer to Milligan and Cooper (1987).
In K-means method, the final results (clusters) are obtained via an iterative refine-
ment. The clustering process is done in the following five steps:

1. Setting K (which is the number of clusters) and start with randomly generated K cen-
troids.
  The final clustering results obtained from K-means method and also many other
similar methods for clustering are highly sensitive to the initial cluster centers, so, in
order to create a kind of procedural unity, it is common to select the first members of the
list as the initial centroids. Here, countries have been alphabetically sorted (ascending)
for the first step and then based on their DEVI scores (descending) for the second step
(clustering developing countries),
2. Calculating the squared Euclidean distance for all countries from each cluster’s centroid,
3. Assigning each country to its nearest cluster (i.e., the cluster whose centroid has the
minimum squared Euclidean distance with country’s DEVI score),
4. Re-computing the centroids by averaging all the DEVI scores of the countries assigned
to each centroid’s cluster,
5. Performing the iteration process between steps 2, 3 and 4 until no change can be seen
in cluster’s members (the stopping criterion).

Here, K-means algorithm have been repeated from K = 2–10 and then the average sil-
houette method applied for finding the optimum number of the clusters. For each K, the
average silhouette of observations have been calculated and then by plotting it over the
number of clusters (K), the optimum number of clusters (maximum value of the curve)
determined as well. For the detailed discussion about the average silhouette method, see
Rousseeuw (1987).
The three steps for computing each country’s silhouette are as follows:

1 Average distance of the country form all other countries in its cluster must be estimated,
call it 𝛼,
2 For each other clusters, country’s average distance from all others in that cluster must
be calculated and the minimum value must be determined, call it β,
3 The silhouette coefficient for that country is given by:
S = (𝛽 − 𝛼)∕max(𝛼, 𝛽) (3)
To determine the cluster containing the most developed countries (i.e., separating
most developed countries from the others), the CCA is presented with the three steps as
follows:

1. The optimum number of clusters by considering all of the 157 countries is determined
by applying the average silhouette method, call it KASM, and countries are clustered by
applying K-means method, where K = KASM,

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 M. Jabbari et al.

2. Check whether the cluster with the highest development level contains all the CWAD,
and if it does, then stop the process; otherwise, decrease one unit from K and go to the
next step,
3. Redo the clustering with new values and go to step 2.

Therefore, the number of clusters will be the outputs of this algorithm (K). This is the
nearest number to the optimum for the clusters, while all of the CWAD are included
in a cluster. In other words, using this algorithm, countries having development proxim-
ity with the CWAD are placed in the same cluster (the most developed cluster), while the
number of clusters remains as near as possible to the optimum. This creates a trade-off
between the outputs of the statistical method (average silhouette) and a real-world defini-
tion for developed countries (CWAD). Therefore, the algorithm provides a more realistic
output (Fig. 3).
Running means have not been used for both steps of clustering. However, convergence
criterion has been applied in order to reduce the sensitivity of the process to the countries’
orders in the respective cluster. The convergence was achieved after five iterations in the
first step (CCA) and in the second step of clustering, after nine iterations.

Fig. 3  Combined criterion algo-

rithm (CCA) used to distinguish Find optimum number of
developed countries from the rest clusters using silhouette
method

(First criterion)

Cluster countries
using K-means
method

If there is a cluster which included

all the CWAD, that is the Developed
cluster then stop the process.

(Second criterion)

If not go ahead

Decrease a unit
from the number
of clusters

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Differentiating countries based on the sustainable development…

Table 3  Top seven countries Country DEVI ENVI

based on the aggregated
development index (DEVI)
Sweden 92.47 65.19
arranged in descending order
together with their ENVI scores Norway 91.21 62.63
in the right column Finland 90.01 66.45
Switzerland 90.00 61.71
Denmark 89.90 65.11
Iceland 89.79 51.08
The Netherlands 89.05 60.53

Table 4  Top seven countries Country ENVI DEVI

based on the aggregated
environmental index (ENVI)
Burkina Faso 82.81 39.09
arranged in descending order
together with their DEVI score in Chad 80.48 29.58
the right column Hungary 80.36 80.74
Nepal 80.19 56.76
Czech Republic 79.84 85.37
Moldova 79.06 74.11
Uganda 78.72 45.85

Fig. 4  Development performances (DEVI scores) and global environmental commitments (ENVI scores)
for developed countries. The red and green circles indicate the DEVI and ENVI scores associated with each
country, respectively. The reference lines on Y axis are the cluster’s average weighted by population. Coun-
tries have been sorted based on their differences in DEVI and ENVI scores. On the left-hand side of the
figure, there are countries whose commitment to the global environment (ENVI score) is much lower than
their development performances (DEVI score), and an inverse manner can be seen on the right-hand side

5 Results and discussion

The selected results for DEVI and ENVI scores for the top seven countries are presented
in Tables 3 and 4. It can be observed that although the ENVI scores for countries with best
performances in the DEVs are partly similar to each other, the DEVI scores associated
with the best countries in the ENVs are very different. Figure  4 illustrates a comparison
between a country’s DEVI scores and its status in the ENVI scores for the 43 developed

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 M. Jabbari et al.

Fig. 5  Introduced composite
index for development perfor-
mances (DEVI) and the human
development index (HDI) (Sachs
et al. 2017b) for 157 UN mem-
bers with fit line. The linear R is
equal to 0.96

countries. The scattering among the ENVI scores in comparison with those of the DEVI
is observable inside the cluster. In other words, some countries (placed in the left of the
chart) have less commitments to the global environmental issues compared to the others
(right and middle of the chart), while their development levels are very similar.
Here, the development composite index (DEVI) has been compared with two other
major development indices. First, as mentioned before, the HDI as the most well recog-
nized composite index for indicating the well-being and countries ranking into different
tiers of HD. A high correlation has been observed between DEVI and HDI (Fig. 5). The
analysis of reasons behind this correlation is beyond the scope of this discussion. However,
the mere existence of this correlation can increase the validity of DEVI as a multidimen-
sional development index.
Second (the GDP per capita), as expected, showed more deviation (see Fig.  6). The
analysis of the reasons of such deviation is beyond the scope of the presented work, but as
GDP is widely used in development-related discussions, the mere existence of this devia-
tion reinforces the importance of introducing such a multidimensional composite index.
The qualitative clustering of 157 countries according to their DEVI scores led to eight dis-
tinct groups. As illustrated in Fig. 7, countries’ development performances (DEVI) are gener-
ally distributed with a growing dispersion from right to left. This indicates the necessity of
having more clusters in the less developed side of the chart (developing countries).
Using the average silhouette method and CCA led to the total number of eight distin-
guished clusters including all the 157 studied countries. The first cluster (the upper bound of

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Differentiating countries based on the sustainable development…

Fig. 6  Introduced composite
index for development perfor-
mances (DEVI) in terms of gross
domestic product (GDP) per
capita (Sachs et al. 2017b) for
157 UN members. A significant
deviation can be seen between
the parameters

Fig. 7  A cumulative chart displaying 157 UN members according to their development performances
(DEVI scores). Each square represents a UN member. The qualitatively detected clusters are shown by the
rainbow colors from least to highest development performance (from left to right, respectively)

the DEVI scores) which reveals the developed countries includes 43 countries with the highest
development level according to the DEVI. The remaining 114 countries (developing coun-
tries) compose the next seven clusters. The supplementary details about each cluster are pro-
vided in Table 5.

5.1 Discussion on the indicators segregation

The ratio of ENVI to DEVI indicates the environmental commitment of an individual country
relative to the development level of that country. As shown in Fig. 8, all the clusters except
the developed cluster and the first of the developing clusters have the ratio greater than one,
indicating that their environmental commitment is relatively beyond their development per-
formance. Furthermore, the strictly ascending trend of the chart reinforces the second reason
proposed in Sect.  3 for the necessity of indicators segregation between development’s and
environment’s indicators, which has been numerically verified here.

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Table 5  Statistically clustered clusters: one cluster for the developed countries and seven for the developing countries
Clusters Number of GDP share (%) Population Average ­DEVIa Average ­ENVIa Cluster ­centroidb DEVI range ENVI range
members share (%)

Developed 43 44.7 16.3 84.7 58.9 83.9 15.5 45.7

Developing 114 55.3 83.7 61.1 63.0 58.1 53.5 45.3
Developing 1st 27 31.9 30.8 72.3 59.7 72.4 6.3 41.6
Developing 2nd 26 5.2 7.0 66.5 66.1 67.2 5.3 34.4
Developing 3rd 13 6.2 7.1 62.4 63.9 60.9 4.6 25.3
Developing 4th 16 9.9 27.8 55.3 63.1 53.9 7.9 26.7
Developing 5th 16 1.9 6.5 43.2 69.4 44.0 6.4 32.1
Developing 6th 14 3.9 4.2 36.6 64.5 36.8 7.0 22.0
Developing 7th 2 0.0 0.3 27.9 80.0 26.2 6.8 1.9
Total (world) 157 100 100 6 62.3 69.7 48.1
a
 Averages weighted by countries population
b
 The DEVI score corresponding to each cluster’s final centroid
M. Jabbari et al.
Differentiating countries based on the sustainable development…

Fig. 8  Ratio of ENVI to DEVI for all developed and developing clusters. Broken line denotes the global
average ratio. From the developed cluster to the 7th developing cluster, there can be seen a growing distance
between countries’ DEVI scores and their ENVI scores

Table 6  Comparison between Member state Most developed UNFCCC OECD

the developed countries’ cluster cluster Annex 1
and common lists of developed
countries for the year of 2017
Argentina + − −
Belarus + + −
Bulgaria − + −
Chile − − +
Croatia + + −
Cuba + − −
Cyprus + + −
Israel + − +
Kazakhstan + − −
Korea Rep. + − +
Lichtenstein − + −
Lithuania + + −
Malta + − −
Monaco − + −
Mexico − − +
Romania − + −
Russian federation − + −
Singapore + − −
Turkey − + +
Ukraine + + −
Uruguay + − −

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 M. Jabbari et al.

Table 7  Difference between the lists of developed countries in 2017 and 2018. Five are excluded and left
the list and two newcomers have been added
Country/cluster 2017 DEVI score 2018 DEVI score Difference between 2017
and 2018 DEVI score

Argentina 77.3 75.1 2.27↓

Cuba 78.1 71.4 6.70↓
Greece 78.2 74.7 3.45↓
Kazakhstan 77.3 73.7 3.53↓
Uruguay 76.9 75.6 1.32↓
Developed cluster 83.9 83.4 0.5↓
Moldova 74.1 76.6 2.46↑
Serbia 75.3 76.6 1.26↑

5.2 Comparison of the developed cluster with other categories for developed

countries

The inclusion of all OECD members, except countries with economies in transition (EIT),
was anticipated due to the applied CCA (Sect. 4.2). Therefore, the first cluster covers all but
those three emerging OECD members further to the extra 11 countries with high development
index, which are not OECD members (Table 6).
UNFCCC in 1992 has listed 43 countries in Annex I, from which all except 6 countries are
included in the developed cluster. Three of these 6 (Bulgaria, Russian Federation and Roma-
nia) have been excluded as EIT, and the other two (Lichtenstein and Monaco) are out of the
157 countries covered by the present study (due to the insufficient indicators statistical data).
Also, Turkey has not been included in developed cluster (Table 6).

5.3 Applying differentiation method for the year of 2018 and comparing the results

On July 2018, SDG Index and Dashboards Report of 2018 has been published (Sachs et al.
2018). There are some differences between the SDG Reports of 2018 and 2017, but for the
purposes of this study they are still comparable.
In this article, the DEVI scores of countries have been calculated by the same method
(used for 2017) and differentiating the developed countries has been also done. The num-
ber of developed countries has been reduced from 43 in 2017 to 40 in 2018. Five countries
have left the list, while two new members have been added. This difference between the
lists of developed countries in 2017 and 2018 is due to the dynamic nature of the pre-
sented method. The excluded countries which have not been determined as developed in
2018 while being on the developed list of 2017 are Argentina, Cuba, Greece, Uruguay and
Kazakhstan. The Moldova and Serbia are newcomers to the developed cluster. Table  7
shows that the excluded countries have experienced significant reduction in their DEVI
scores in comparison with the cluster’s average.

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Differentiating countries based on the sustainable development…

6 Conclusions

In this article, attempts have been made to develop a model based on SDG index of 157
countries accommodating 97% of the world’s population to include different human
aspects, in an equitable and acceptable manner, in order to differentiate the parties to the
UN. Furthermore, in this model differentiation and clustering have been produced using
the different SD levels of the countries.
It has been noted that separation between the 11 development goals (DEVs) and the 4
environmental goals (ENVs) at the aggregation step of the SDG index results in increasing
the development score of least developed and poor countries in a superficial manner which
in turn results in significant error in clustering of such countries. Therefore, a compos-
ite index, which merely is to present DEVs indicators (DEVI), has been presented. This
composite index in comparison with gross domestic product (GDP) figures showed low
correlation level, while when compared with multidimensional human development index
(HDI), it showed significantly high correlation level. This high level of correlation dem-
onstrates the credible applicability of DEVI in assessing the living conditions of human
beings in different countries.
Consequently, a combined criteria algorithm (CCA) has been developed to cluster
countries based on the DEVI scores similarities. Applying this algorithm for 2017 showed
that Argentina, Belarus, Cuba, Croatia, Cyprus, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Malta, Singapore,
Ukraine and Uruguay despite not being party to OECD, however, following their respec-
tive DEVI scores, have been placed in developed countries’ pertinent cluster, contrary to
the fact that countries such as Turkey, Chile and Mexico that are parties to the OECD have
not been included in such cluster.
Based on the same approach, countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and Russian
Federation, despite being enlisted in Annex I of the UNFCCC, have not been placed in the
developed country cluster. Although such divergence has been observed, the 43 countries
in the developed countries’ cluster show acceptable conformity with conventional existing
clustering practices and lists. Also, adopting statistical clustering approach, 114 developing
countries accounting for over 84% of the studied population have been clustered in seven
groups.
It should be highlighted that using the same CCA approach for 2018 placed 40 coun-
tries in developed countries’ cluster. Due to the dynamic nature of the presented algorithm,
when compared with 2017 results, five countries—Argentina, Cuba, Greece, Kazakhstan
and Uruguay—as a result of the reduction in their DEVI scores have been excluded from
the previous developed countries’ cluster, and instead, two countries—Moldova and Ser-
bia—have been added to the cluster.

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