Comparing Sustainable Development Evaluation Methods Using Composite Indicators (Case Study of Iran's Provinces)

One of the main necessities of the national sustainable development process is attention to b paid to regional characteristics by utilizing a collection of economic, social, and environmental indicators in order to optimally designate resources to various regions while identifying these differences. On one hand, identifying the indicators and methods in order to show these differences is very important. On this basis, two issues have been studied in order to reach this overall aim. Initially, 13 indicators from economic, social and environmental precincts have been identified and their related data have been gathered for 28 provinces of the Iran. In order to provide a composite indicator, the 5 methods of Z- Score, Morris, MacGranahan, Factor analysis and principal component analysis have been utilized and composite indicators for the provinces have been computed and categorized. According to this categorization, Tehran, Kohkiluye and Buyerahmad, and Semnan provinces have been mainly ranked first to third, while Sistan and Baluchestan and Kordestan provinces are ranked among the last. After categorizing and providing composite indicators for the provinces, the correlation of the five methods with which their categorization was carried out using composite indicators was needed. For this aim, the Spearman correlation coefficient of the province,s ranking was calculated. These coefficients show that all methods have a meaningful relation with each other, but this relation is greater between some methods such as MacGranahan and the principal component analysis.