Sustainable Development and National differences: An European Cross-National Analysis of Economic Sustainability

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015) can be considered the synthesis of a debate, which sets the sustainable development as a priority for the International Community, committing Member States of the United Nations collectively to achieve by the year 2030 a series of sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the social, economic and environmental fields. The achievement of the SDGs has therefore made necessary to develop a system of indicators, to evaluate and compare the state of achievement of the over 100 targets in which the 17 SDGs are organized. In this paper, we would like to analyze the situation of some European countries in terms of achievieng SDGs. We focus on the four goals belonging to the economic dimension of sustainable development, in particular comparing the situation of Italy with that of the other nations of the European Union. The research methodology is to use the Adjusted Mazziotta-Pareto Index (AMPI) for creating a composite index for each goal considered, and then to construct the synthetic measure of economic sustainability, taking into account the previous indices.