Brian Mackay

Sustainability and sustainable development have been at the forefront of global agendas for the last 30 years. As a result, hundreds of indicators and indices have been developed and embraced worldwide in an effort to track progress and measure achievements towards sustainability across its three pillars – environment, social and economic. However, this vast quantity of indices has overwhelmed researchers and professionals, warranting simpler metrics. Additionally, Asia has been trailing behind many regions throughout the globe but is increasingly becoming more urbanized and on track for unprecedented population growth through 2050 (United Nations, 2018). It has become critical that Asia and urban measures of sustainable development be included in national and global sustainability assessments. This paper is built around four guiding research questions focussed on the sustainable development and urbanization of Asia: (1) What are the underlying development themes within a collection of established sustainability indices? (2) Are the three pillars of sustainability equally represented by current sustainable measuring initiatives? (3) How do four key measures of urbanization – population density, percent urban, population and urban growth rate – relate to the latent dimensions of sustainable development and how do the results inform humanity’s progress toward sustainability? These questions were answered using a collection of 35 sustainable development indices across 44 Asian nations. First, a factor analysis reduces the 35 indices into six distinct dimensions of sustainability. Second, spatial autocorrelation was assessed using Global Moran’s I and Local Anselin Moran’s I local indicators of spatial association (L.I.S.A) statistics to reveal varying levels of spatial autocorrelation of the variables. Finally, conditional autoregression (CAR) models find eight statistically significant relationships between the four measures of sustainable development and six dimensions. Overall, results indicate the dominance of socio-economic themes and a devaluation of environmental dimensions among the collection of indices and nations.