Social Sustainability, Poverty, and Income : An Empirical Exploration

Social sustainability is often poorly understood and vaguely defined, despite growing appreciationof its relevance as a concept. This paper advances the empirical understanding of social sustainability byconstructing a global database of 71 indicators across 193 countries and 37 territories between 2016 and 2020. Theindicators are flexibly clustered around four dimensions—social inclusion, resilience, social cohesion,and process legitimacy—for which measurement indices are constructed. A simple empirical analysis using the databaseconfirms that social sustainability is positively and strongly associated with per capita income, negatively andstrongly associated with poverty, and negatively but weakly associated with income inequality. Much remains to beanalyzed to understand the interactions between dimensions, but the results underscore that social sustainabilitymatters not only in itself, but also to reduce poverty. Furthermore, extending access to markets, basic publicservices, and social assistance needs to be complemented with strengthening process legitimacy and social cohesion ifinequality is to be reduced.