The Usefulness of Indicators of Sustainability to Countries in Promoting Their Sustainable Development

Evaluate the usefulness of indicators of sustainability to countries in promoting their sustainable development

Sustainable development is development of a country’s economy that is able to be maintained long into the future. Therefore, it considers that development should be achieved whilst catering to needs of future generations. As well as this, sustainable development includes environmental factors such as thinking about negative externalities. Thirdly, sustainable development includes social factors, so a country can develop in a way that improves all of its resident’s quality of life. There are many ways to measure this type of development, for example: GDP per capita, literacy rate, life expectancy and % population in absolute poverty.

One way in which these indicators are useful to an economy is that it can help a country make policy decisions and choices. Therefore, governments can base policies in these statistics. The four areas they can focus upon are: ecological, welfare, coherent society and culture. Achieving a coherent society is can be achieved by investing taxation revenue in areas of poverty, to reduce the absolute poverty rate. Welfare growth can be achieved by investing money in education, Ecological balance can be achieved by investing in research and development of alternative fuels and viable culture is a policy unique to Estonia, which includes values in upbringing, ethics and morals. Therefore a country can see which of these areas they are struggling in based upon the indicators and invest in improving these areas.

Another way in which these indicators are useful is that they allow a country to track its improvement and growth year on year. Based upon these indicators, they can set targets for them to reach in the future. This is beneficial to an economy as it gives them a clear direction of where they are heading in the future. Having a clear aim may also mean that the country as a whole will be determined to reach their goals....