An Evaluation of Sustainable Development in Chinese Counties Based on SDGs

With the increasingly urgent demand for the localization of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs), the construction of an evaluation system and the practice paths of counties, as important spatial units of China’s sustainable development, urgently need to be deepened. Based on the articulation of the SDGs and China’s national conditions, this study innovatively designed an indicator delivery framework covering the United Nations level to the county level; constructed a county-level sustainable development evaluation indicator system that includes three dimensions, including economic development, social culture, and ecological environment; adopted the entropy weight method to determine the weights of indicators; and introduced a dynamic evaluation and analysis model utilizing three analytical methods, namely coupling coordination analysis, obstacle analysis, and Dagum decomposition, to evaluate the level of sustainable development of 76 counties in the 2010–2021 period considering both time and space. The results show that (1) the national county sustainable development index (CSDI) was significantly improved, regional differences were narrowed, the central region has the best overall performance, and the western region has the fastest growth rate; (2) economic development has become the main driving force, and the economic gap between regions has gradually narrowed, but the spatial heterogeneity of the environmental and social dimensions is still prominent; (3) the eastern region has generated positive spillover effects on the central and western regions through industrial transfer and technology diffusion, while the northeastern region develops relatively slowly due to the lagging industrial transformation; and (4) the degree of coupling coordination rises as a whole, but the differences in synergistic ability between regions are obvious. This study provides a scientific basis for the formulation of differentiated sustainable development policies for counties and emphasizes the key role of regional synergy mechanisms in narrowing the development gap.