Qualimetric approaches to assessing sustainable development indicators

Abstract

The study discusses approaches to assessing the quality of sustainable development indicators and analyses sustainable development indicators in general, for which the desirability function and the approach of translating sustainable development indicators into a dimensionless scale are used. This approach makes it possible to analyse the processes of achieving the sustainable development goals and relevant tasks on the basis of statistical data, as well as to compare indicators with different characteristics. For the purpose of qualimetric assessment, the article proposes to divide the indicators of sustainable development into four groups characterized by the following parameters: the lowest value is the best, the highest value is the best, the average value is the best, and the values that simultaneously tend to the lowest and the highest. It is proposed to evaluate sustainable development indicators in accordance with the group, taking into account the significance of the indicator, for which the form parameter and the evaluation step are selected by the expert evaluation method. For example, several sustainable development indicators for different groups are presented, and calculations are made to determine the dimensionless indicator, taking into account its significance according to the opinion of experts. As a result, we obtained dimensionless values for each of the sustainable development indicators (FQ = 0.92, 0.98, 0.86, 0.28, and 0.54), which characterize the achievement of sustainable development goals and allow us to assess progress in both a prospective and retrospective context.