A Novel Three-Way Approach to the Analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals in the EU Countries

Since their adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while non-binding, have served as a strategic compass, encouraging nations to adopt consistent sustainability measures within their own institutional contexts. To analyze how European Union (EU) countries are progressing towards the SDGs, combining an analysis of the relationships between different SDGs with an assessment of the relationships between countries, a Generalized STATIS method, called GSTATIS, is presented. Following a three-way approach designed for the analysis of complex data, the proposed method uses two different sets of weights for classes of countries and groups of SDGs to explicitly account for the role they play in the three-way variability. Unlike the standard STATIS method, which accounts for relationships between countries but overlooks the potential interactions between SDGs, GSTATIS recognizes that different groups of SDGs and classes of countries with group-correlated SDGs may contribute unequally to the three-way variability. Therefore, the “compromise” matrix is defined by using different optimal sets of weights for both classes of countries and groups of SDGs. As a result, GSTATIS offers a novel perspective on sustainability analysis, leveraging a three-way approach that simultaneously addresses within- and between-country variability by identifying groups of SDGs with highly correlated trends across countries.