Greater legitimacy of small island developing states: a statistical perspective on its definition

Small island developing states (SIDS) has been inserted into much of the inter-governmental discourse in areas such as climate change, environmental protection, vulnerabilities and socio-economic development. However, concerns remain about the group's legitimacy, leading to questions about the attainability of its geopolitical objectives. These concerns emanate in part, from the lack of explicit and defined classification criteria for the group. This paper represents an attempt at resolving this problem and adds to the work on this area. Its main contribution is an easily implemented statistical procedure that endogenously generates these criteria for conceptually relevant indicators. This procedure accords each self-identified SIDS a presumption of 'innocence' - only being found 'guilty of pretence' if it violates the selection criteria that the self-identified group in a statistical methodology created. This is applied to a set of indicators based on relevant concepts to propose strict and relaxed definitions of SIDS.