Monitoring and evaluation of sustainable development goals in Paraíba

Abstract

Purpose: To monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of indicators related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Paraíba, separately and in comparison to the averages of the other federative units of the Northeast region, Brazil and a cluster of similar units.  Methodology: 62 indicators were built for all federative units in Brazil from 14 different open databases, most of them available for the period 2015 to 2019. To monitor sustainable development over time in a synthetic way, the indicators were aggregated in the Sustainable Development Index of Paraiba (IDS-PB). Basic socioeconomic characteristics, such as population and GDP were used to identify, using the unsupervised machine learning algorithm K-Medoids, the cluster of units similar to Paraíba.  Findings: the IDS-PB Paraíba showed a strong advance between 2015 and 2017, when the difference between the states’ stage of development and the average of the other units in the Northeast region, Brazil and its cluster was drastically reduced. However, as of 2018, this approximation has stagnated, which keeps Paraíba still far from the average level of development of the rest of the country. Results disaggregated by dimensions show that the Environmental and Institutional dimensions contributed the most positively to bringing Paraíba closer to the comparison groups, while the Economic dimension contributed the most negatively.  Contributions: the results presented help to identify bottlenecks and success stories in the sustainable development agenda of Paraíba, which can be used for a more effective planning of public policies aimed at promoting such development.