Measurement of the Importance of 11 Sustainable Development Criteria: How Do the Important Criteria Differ among Four Asian Countries and Shift as the Economy Develops?

Tomohiro Tasaki, Ryo Tajima and Yasuko Kameyama
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Tomohiro Tasaki: National Institute for Environmental Studies, 16-2 Onogawa, Tsukuba 305-8506, Ibaraki, Japan
Ryo Tajima: National Institute for Environmental Studies, 16-2 Onogawa, Tsukuba 305-8506, Ibaraki, Japan
Yasuko Kameyama: National Institute for Environmental Studies, 16-2 Onogawa, Tsukuba 305-8506, Ibaraki, Japan

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 17, 1-17

Abstract: Understanding the criteria underlying development in a country is crucial to formulating developmental plans. However, it is not always clear which criteria are more important than others in different countries and at different times. The relationship between developmental criteria and the stage of economic development is also unclear in many countries. Therefore, we devised an indirect stated preference approach for the measurement of the importance of developmental criteria and employed it in four Asian countries—Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam—to measure the importance of sustainable development (SD) criteria perceived by the general public. Specifically, we evaluated the importance of 58 national goals linked to 1 of 11 SD criteria. Security, efficiency, accessibility, capability, and environmental capacity were perceived as relatively important by respondents in all four countries. The respondents perceived that the currently important criteria would be important in the future as well. The order of the importance in each country differed. For example, environmental capacity was ranked lower, and inclusiveness was ranked higher as the gross domestic product of a country increased. Thai and Vietnamese respondents had similar perceptions and, overall, tended to have higher levels of importance than South Korean and Japanese respondents, who also had similar perceptions of importance.

Keywords: sustainability criteria; national target; country development stage; indirect stated preference; sustainable development goals (SDGs) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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