Embedded Files
This page will be continuously updated as the project progresses as methods and calculations may change.
We collapsed the 16 out of the 17 UN development goals into 4 elementary categories: Economy, Environment, Health, Justice.
At our current stage of research, we eliminated the goal of "Partnership for the Goals", which called for strong global partnership and corporations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), from our calculation for the obvious reason that it will be hard to quantify the extent of achieving this goal for individual countries.
For the 4 categories that we established, we are using already established indices and data sets for our calculations. We are using Ecological Footprint, life expectancy data, GDP per capita, and the Social Justice Index. You can find more about our methodology here.
The graph below ranks EU and OECD countries based on our TIP index from the highest to the lowest:
The graph below illustrates the impact of each individual category had on forming the final Tartan Index of Progress.
The rankings above present both surprising and unsurprising results. Many of the Slavic countries ranked at the top, while other Western Europe countries ranked in the middle. We found it interesting to look at the United States in particular, because of its surprisingly low place in our rankings. The US has the highest nominal GDP in the world, but it has a rather mediocre TIP score. The second graph, which breaks down our ranking into categories allows us to explore this more. We see that the United States ranks as one of the worst countries under the Social Justice Index and Ecological Footprint, which counteracts its relatively average to large GDP per capita and life expectancy.
Something that we are planning on exploring next is whether we should weight the different categories differently. Should the environmental health of a country be weighed more than its commitment to justice? Should life expectancy and economic welfare be weighted equally? The current index uses a simple weighted average for the sake of simplicity but could likely be improved upon.
We would also like to be able to apply our index to other countries as well. We are currently limited by the fact that the Social Justice Index is limited to OECD and EU countries. To get around this we may need to find another data set, find a way to collect our own data, or find another way to define justice.
The graphs below illustrate the correlations between the Tartan Index of Progress and other popular indices.
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