Coherence between Human and Sustainable Development: a DP2-Based Assessment

This article examines the coherence between the Human Development Index (HDI) and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) performance, explicitly accounting for inter-indicator dependence. Standard composite indices often rely on equal-weight arithmetic averaging and implicitly assume independence across components, which can double-count highly correlated measures and distort cross-country comparisons. We address this redundancy by applying the DP2 (Pena Distance) methodology, which corrects each indicator’s contribution using sequential R²-based factors and retains only unique information. Using panel data for 110 selected countries over 2015–2022, we build DP2-adjusted indices for: 1) human development based on the HDI components (life expectancy, schooling and income); 2) sustainable development based on the 17 goal-level SDG scores. We then compute a Development Coherence Index that captures the alignment between the two adjusted trajectories and classify countries into four regimes: high–high coherent, human-leading, sustainability-leading and low–low trap. Results show that redundancy adjustment can substantially re-order country performance, especially among high-income economies, where clusters of correlated SDG indicators tend to inflate headline sustainability scores. The coherence typology highlights systematic imbalances, for example, cases where human capabilities advance faster than environmental and institutional outcomes, pointing to potential policy incoherence and risks of development reversals. Convergence tests suggest conditional catching-up: lagging countries improve faster in some domains, yet coherence gaps often persist across income groups and regions over time. Overall, the proposed framework offers a practical tool for monitoring balanced progress towards the 2030 Agenda, targeting policy priorities to countries’ specific development constraints, and improving the design of indicators in practice.