Social Sustainability, Poverty, and Income : An Empirical Exploration
Social sustainability is often poorly understood and vaguely defined, despite growing appreciation of its relevance as a concept. This paper advances the empirical understanding of social sustainability by constructing a global database of 71 indic...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099915206132218553/IDU05fa103b00466704a130bfec06158420e23ee http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37543 |
| Summary: | Social sustainability is often poorly
understood and vaguely defined, despite growing appreciation
of its relevance as a concept. This paper advances the
empirical understanding of social sustainability by
constructing a global database of 71 indicators across 193
countries and 37 territories between 2016 and 2020. The
indicators 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 database
confirms that social sustainability is positively and
strongly associated with per capita income, negatively and
strongly associated with poverty, and negatively but weakly
associated with income inequality. Much remains to be
analyzed to understand the interactions between dimensions,
but the results underscore that social sustainability
matters not only in itself, but also to reduce poverty.
Furthermore, extending access to markets, basic public
services, and social assistance needs to be complemented
with strengthening process legitimacy and social cohesion if
inequality is to be reduced. |
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