Synthetic indicators of the 2030 Agenda: Evidence from Eurostat using Stata

This presentation constructs synthetic sustainability indicators based on the 2030 Agenda using harmonized Eurostat data and fully reproducible procedures implemented entirely in Stata. I consider time series for the 169 targets of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) over the period 2000–2023, covering 27 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Slovak Republic, Spain, and Sweden. The indicators are downloaded directly from Eurostat using the community-contributed eurostatuse command, ensuring transparency, traceability, and easy data updates. Based on these series, synthetic indices are constructed following the methodology proposed by Rivero and Fernández (2008). The SDG targets are normalized on a scale from 0 to 1, distinguishing between direct and inverse variables, so that higher values reflect a greater probability of achieving the corresponding goal. Subsequently, the normalized values are aggregated to obtain partial indices for each SDG, calculated as the average of the targets included in each goal. Following the classification of the SDGs into five pillars proposed by Tremblay et al. (2020), the goal-level indices are weighted and aggregated to construct synthetic indicators for each pillar, in line with the institutional structure of the 2030 Agenda. The entire process of normalization, weighting, and aggregation is implemented in Stata, allowing for a coherent treatment of panel data and facilitating the replicability of the analysis. Building on these synthetic indicators, the presentation conducts two complementary empirical applications. First, this systematic treatment allow us to examine the causal interactions among the 5 pillars of the 2030 Agenda for 28 countries over the period 2000–2021. The results reveal a leadership role of the planet pillar over the remaining pillars, while the planet, peace, prosperity, and partnership pillars jointly exhibit leadership over the people pillar. These findings highlight the central importance of environmental sustainability and international cooperation as prerequisites for social well-being and economic prosperity. Second, this novel dataset also assesses the efficiency of public spending in achieving the SDGs in 27 European countries during the period 1995–2023 by applying data envelopment analysis (DEA) models. The results show efficiency scores ranging from 0.70 to 0.94 for inputs and from 0.80 to 0.94 for outputs, indicating potential improvement margins of up to 30.6% in resource use or 20.3% in outcomes. Denmark, Ireland, Finland, and Sweden emerge as consistent benchmarks of sustained efficiency over time. Overall, the combined use of eurostatuse and customized Stata routines provides a flexible and fully reproducible framework for the comparative analysis of sustainability performance and policy efficiency in Europe.