Sustainable Economic Development Assessment and Citizen Well-Being

We aggregate the sustainable economic development assessment rankings for the ten SEDA dimensions to provide an overall score for each country. This score can be used to compare a country with any other country or group of countries. In general, wealthier countries tend to have higher scores than less wealthy countries. SEDA’s ten dimensions also provide an organizing structure for reviewing priorities for remedial action, since a country’s performance relative to the rest of the world or a group of peers can highlight critical strengths and weaknesses. Armed with such insights, governments can begin to identify strategies for addressing the most pressing issues.

Drawing on 13 years of comparable SEDA scores, BCG tracks the change in SEDA score over that period as well as countries’ recent sustainable economic growth. We can also track changes in each dimension of the SEDA score.

Using SEDA scores, we can examine how well countries are able to convert their wealth (as reflected in income per capita) into well-being. We do this using a measure called the wealth to well-being coefficient. This coefficient compares a country’s SEDA score with the score that would be expected given the country’s GNI (gross national income) per capita. The coefficient thus provides a relative indicator of how well a country has converted its wealth into the well-being of its population.

Countries with a coefficient of 1.0 are generating well-being in line with what would be expected given their income levels. Countries that have a coefficient greater than 1.0 deliver higher levels of well-being than would be expected given their GNI levels, while those below 1.0 deliver lower levels of well-being than would be expected.