Who drives negative sustainable development impacts on others?
Each country’s actions can have positive or negative effects on other countries’ abilities to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The Spillover Index assesses such spillovers along three dimensions: environmental & social impacts embodied into trade, economy & finance, and security. A higher score means that a country causes more positive and fewer negative spillover effects.
Environmental & Social Impacts include emissions related to the production of imported goods and social impacts, such as modern slavery, involved in this production.
A great illustration of this is the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in the final consumption of textiles and clothing. Although China generates 40% of these emissions, it only consumes 5% of textiles and clothing. In contrast, the USA and Europe generate 12% but consume 42% (having roughly 50% lower population, that makes 16 times higher consumption of those products more per person). Spillover Index is saying that the shirt you wear is part of your CO2 footprint and not the country who produced it for you.
Economy and Finance Impacts involve corporate tax havens and shifted profits of multinationals, as well as official development assistance from high-income to lower-income countries. The targeted level of assistance is set at 0.7% of Gross National Income, with the current level being 0.4%. Only five countries reach or exceed that level: Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Saudi Arabia.
Security relates to exports of major conventional weapons. The biggest exporter, measured by total inflow of money per 100,000 inhabitants, is Israel, followed by France, Russia, the USA, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden.
The average spillover score in the world, combining all three dimensions, is 93.7, dropping to 73.8 for OECD countries, and even further to 69.9 for high-income countries. t’s a bit like a reverse leaderboard, where lower scores aren’t something to brag about.
Singapore tops the list of “spillers” with a score of 35.82, followed by other high-income countries. In Europe, the leading forces are Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, Cyprus, and Switzerland.
Poland has the highest score for an OECD country from Europe, with a score of 84.79, ranking 114th out of 166 measured countries.
The picture below summarizes this well: the SDG Index increases with income level, driven by the quality of life aspects of sustainable development goals. However, when it comes to environmental impacts and adverse effects on other countries, the picture is reversed.
With this post, I conclude a subjective overview of Sustainable Development Goals Index.
I started with a methodology overview, and continued with deep dive into an interesting approach to define measures and targets for Zero Hunger objective, and now conclude with spillover effects. These two posts illustrate some important sustainable development challenges. For a full review of the Index, I encourage you to read Sustainable Development Report, executive summary should be enough to gain a good understanding of the main findings and conclusions.
Feel free to share your thoughts and let’s discuss how we can all contribute to a more sustainable future! What steps do you think your country could take to improve its Spillover Index score?
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