Monitoring the evolution of sustainable development goals in the European Union: a synthetic approach

This paper aims to monitor status and progress in sustainable development within the European Union. To this end, we select a set of representative indicators of the different objectives of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to elaborate a synthetic indicator allowing for country classification and performance. For this purpose, we propose a procedure that starts applying functional principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of the available data and to evaluate the likely loss of original information. Then, the procedure calculates a synthetic indicator for each SDG using the explained variance. Finally, a global indicator is obtained considering that each goal has the same importance. This procedure allows us to obtain a set of synthetic indicators which show the differences between European countries. By doing so, we provide valuable help for policy-making and implementing agencies as far it is possible to identify countries with the best performance, namely Nordic and Eastern European countries.