Measuring Sustainable Development Goals Performance provides a quantitative and analytical framework for evaluating social, economic, and environmental policies aiming at the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). Continuing their earlier work on multidimensional analysis, the authors demonstrate how nations can be ranked in terms of their performance in meeting a given set of SDGs, providing numerical calculation of SDGs deficit. Their calculations show that even before the arrival of the COVID-19 virus, there existed in several large Western nations undetected pockets of SDG deficits, such as in the care for the elderly, personal safety, and hygiene. Extending the calculations to cover COVID-19 data for 2020, it turns out that the same deficit nations also suffered excess death rates caused by the virus. This book offers a balanced and holistic paradigm for evaluating progress of the SDGs, assisting the convergence of national and international efforts toward economic development, social progress, and environmental protection.

How do you gauge the accomplishments of policy and its failures? While a number of nations are successful in optimizing a socio-economic welfare function, others are woefully falling short of the optimal frontier. Diagnostics for a Globalized World proposes a reformulation of the inherited theory of economic and social policy (codified in the 1950s by Jan Tinbergen) to find a diagnostic tool in measuring the effectiveness of economic and social policy. Using a logarithmic adaptation of data envelopment analysis, the authors explain how to rank the attainment of nations of multidimensional goals such as those expressed by the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and upcoming Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).