MULTIDIMENSIONAL EVALUATION OF SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
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Methods to measure socioeconomic status (SES) interlinked with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) suffer from methodological limitations. Avoiding problems of scaling and selection of weights, the paper aims at aggregating subjective and objective measures of SES and SDGs by multiplicative aggregation to get composite indices and reflecting overall improvement in a given period over the base period. Proposed indices ensure that Index computed in stages = Index obtained in a single stage. The indices cover variables in any form like percentages, rates, simple counts, ordinal scores, composite indices of the components of SES or SDG and facilitate assessment of changes across time, identification of critical areas, ranking based on relative importance, testing of statistical hypothesis. Combining variables in different scales of measurement by monotonically increasing continuous variable is a novelty. Distance of a country from achieving SDGs can be computed by considering SDG targets in base-period figures. Empirical relationships between and can be established by simple linear regression or relationship among constituent dimensions or targets of and by multiple linear regression or canonical correlation analysis.
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