No.40 An Analytical Exploration of the Indicator Framework for Post-2030 International Development Goals

The target year of 2030 for the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is fast approaching. While the international political discourse currently focuses on speeding up efforts to meet the SDGs, discussions will soon begin for establishing international development goals beyond 2030. Recognizing this need, this study proposes an indicator framework for the post-2030 international development goals based on a review of the challenges facing the SDG global indicator framework. The challenges include, among others, insufficient availability of indicator data, overlaps between some indicators, and indicators’ misalignment with local contexts and monitoring needs of countries. Addressing such challenges, the proposed framework consists of three components: (a) a concise set of global core indicators that require all countries to provide data, (b) a long list of global optional indicators to be adopted by countries at their discretion, and (c) custom indicators to be developed by countries according to their respective policy priorities, monitoring needs, and local contexts. To examine the feasibility of identifying the global core indicators, this study undertook an analysis of official UN SDG data from 2000 to 2023, and selected 47 disaggregated indicators (DIs) utilizing statistical correlations between DI pairs. DIs are detailed indicators that are broken down from the original SDG indicators by indicator-specific categories such as age group, education level, or activity type. The analysis showed that the 47 core DIs could produce country SDG progress scores similar to those calculated with a much larger dataset of 1,112 DIs. The results indicated the usefulness of the proposed approach in selecting the global core indicators for the post-2030 international development goals while also highlighting the need to combine it with other complementary approaches to address its limitations.

Keywords: Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs, Indicator Framework, Positive Correlation