Comparative Analysis of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Achievement Among West African Countries; Application of Extended Topsis Technique

ABSTRACT 

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to compare the performance of selected West African countries regarding their attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The study used the Extended Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) as the main framework. This is because TOPSIS creates room for the incorporation of the three dimensions of sustainability-social, economic and environmental to establish a threshold below which a country is deemed to have failed the sustainability test. Furthermore, the introduction of time-independent threshold permits vivid comparison of countries performance over a given period. The technique also permits the use of plots to present a better visualization of the sustainability performance of countries over time. Design/Methodology - First of all, realistic thresholds were computed for each of the 37 criteria, using averages method. These thresholds were then incorporated into the model. TOPSIS then generated the composite scores, in which the score of the hypothetical country is set as the threshold below which a country is said to have failed a sustainability test. The square of closeness coefficient is then used to decompose the composite scores into dimensional scores. The scores obtained for the three dimensions illustrate the contributions of each dimension to sustainability. This act as a guide to determining which dimension to concentrate on for improvement going forward. Finally, the relative composite score helps to track the progress of each country over a period of time. Findings – In the end, the proposed method was able to rank all the 14 West African countries based on the composite scores and classified them from best performing to worst performing countries. The technique further helped in ranking the dimensional scores and showed the actual contributions of each dimension to the composite score. Plots were used to track the progress or otherwise of countries over the three-year period. Results obtained in evaluating the sustainability performance of countries showed the practical application of the technique. Practical implication- As far as the UN continues to engage countries to never relent in the adoption of strategies to improve the social, economic and environmental dimension of sustainability, this technique can be used to help identify those countries that are meeting the sustainability test or otherwise, as well as track their progress over time.