AGGREGATIONAND PROJECTION OF SUSTAINABILITY INDICATORS : A NEW APPROACH

Sustainability has been one of the major concerns of modern societies, which have long been interested in understanding and governing the multi-faceted issue of development. A comprehensive assessment of sustainability is crucial to different categories of stakeholders, for it allows measuring progress, identifying areas to be addressed and evaluating the outcome of implemented policies. There is a wide literature on sustainability indices and indicators, used as means to assess sustainability in a quantitative and concise way. We have constructed a new sustainability index, the FEEM Sustainability Index (FEEM SI), which introduces a novel approach towards the assessment of sustainability. The novelty of our work is twofold. First of all, it addresses the problem of aggregation of sustainability indicators by implementing an aggregation methodology that focuses specifically on the interrelation between indicators. In fact weights are attributed to single indicators as well as to all possible combinations of indicators belonging to the same node. This non-additive aggregation methodology is particularly wellsuited to deal with multi-attribute issues like sustainability. Secondly, the FEEM SI is built within a dynamic computable general equilibrium model, which allows projecting different scenarios in the future. The model output can then be used to assess sustainability according to the different characteristics of the scenarios. The model is based on a database relative to 2001, and is then projected up to 2020. A database depicting the state of the different regional economies is produced for each year and used to build the set of indicators that compose the FEEM SI. Thanks to this methodology, it is possible to assess how different policies would affect sustainability in the future.