A new perspective for assessing the sustainability of countries

Sustainable development is the concept that plays an important role for the countries in macro as well as micro perspective. In this paper, a fuzzy logic based assessment framework is proposed to measure the sustainable development level of the countries. The proposed model is constructed by analyzing the shortages and favorable parts of existing sustainability measurement approaches. Contrary to existing approaches that divide sustainable development (SD) into hierarchical parts, it evaluates SD at indicator level. The model uses fuzzy logic due to its capacity to handling vague situations. The proposed framework consists of four steps. The initial step determines the indicators to measure the sustainability. Subsequently, a factor analysis is conducted to reduce the number of indicators and obtain mutually exclusive groups of indicator. In the second step, the weights of the previously formed indicator groups are determined in accordance with the opinions of the experts. In the third step, performance scores of the countries are measured from the indicator values. In the fourth step, the countries are compared according to their performance scores and to the weights of indicators. The proposed model is applied to evaluate the relative position of Turkey in SD perspective. The effects of improvements in some SD dimensions on the position of three countries selected are also investigated. Developed as such, the model will guide the policy makers in identifying and prioritizing the most urgent problems that need to be solved in order to obtain improvement in the relative positions of the countries.