Dynamic Sustainability Assessment: The Case of Russia in the Period of Transition (1985-2007)

Russia has experienced twenty years of economic and social change, which has had a substantial impact on the regional and sectoral patterns of the development of its economy, infrastructure, the quality of the environment, and the well-being of its people. The current economic revival offers new opportunities and presents new challenges for the sustainable development of Russia. The paper employs the UN Sustainable Development Framework of Indicators and assesses the sustainability of Russia using multi-criteria evaluation methods, namely the uncertainty randomization multi-criteria evaluation method "Analysis and Synthesis of Parameters under Information Deficiency" (ASPID). The analysis covers economic, environmental, and social trends in Russia's development between 1985 and 2007 and assesses the sustainability of this development from the point of view of multiple criteria. The results show the potential of multi-criteria methods for sustainability assessment at the macro level and offer useful insights into the multidimensional nature of sustainability and the role of priority setting in the evaluation process. Such an analysis reveals the degree of harmony in sustainable development policy. It shows how different sets of priorities determine the outcome of multidimensional analysis of sustainability and could potentially help in assessing progress and designing new policy instruments. This paper is one of the first to apply multi-criteria methods to macro sustainability analysis in a dynamic setting.

Environmentally Extended Input-Output Analysis of the UK Economy: Key Sector Analysis

The paper assesses the sustainability of investment in various economic sectors, with the aim of minimizing resource use and generation of emissions. The broad development focus of the paper and the potential for the proposed methodology to be applied in many different countries make it a useful methodological contribution to the global sustainability debate. The UK case is taken for illustration purposes, and (given the availability of the necessary data) this methodology could be applied in countries with various economic structures and specialisations. An environmentally extended static 123-sector UK input-output model is used, linking a range of physical flows (domestic extraction, use of water, and emissions of CO2, CH4, NOx) with the economic structure of the UK. A range of environmentally adjusted forward and backward linkage coefficients has been developed, adjusted according to final demand, domestic extraction, publicly supplied and directly abstracted water, amd emissions of CO2 and NOx,. The data on the final demand-adjusted and environmentally adjusted forward and backward linkage coefficients were used in a multi-criteria decision-aid assessment, employing a NAIADE method in three different sustainability settings. The assessment was constructed in such a way that each sector of the UK economy was assessed by means of a panel of sustainability criteria, maximizing economic effects and minimizing environmental effects. This type of multi-criteria analysis, applied here for the first time, could prove to be a valuable basis for similar studies, especially in the developing world, where trade-offs between economic development and environmental protection have been the subject of considerable debate.