Measuring the immeasurable — A survey of sustainability indices

摘要: Sustainability indices for countries provide a one-dimensional metric to valuate country-specific information on the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, environmental, and social conditions. At policy level, they suggest an unambiguous yardstick against which country’s development can be measured even cross-country comparison performed. This paper reviews explanatory power various sustainability applied in practice. We show that these fail fulfill fundamental scientific requirements making them rather useless if not misleading with respect advice.