Social sustainability, poverty and income: An empirical exploration

Social sustainability is poorly understood and vaguely defined, despite growing appreciation for its relevance as a concept. This article advances our empirical understanding of social sustainability by constructing a global database of 71 indicators across 193 countries and 37 territories between 2016 and 2020. Indicators are flexibly clustered around four dimensions—social inclusion, resilience, social cohesion and process legitimacy—for which we construct measurement indices. A simple empirical analysis—based on correlations and scatterplots—using our database confirms that social sustainability is positively and strongly associated with per capita income; negatively and strongly associated with poverty; and negatively but weakly associated with income inequality. The interactions between dimensions merit further analysis, but our results underscore that social sustainability matters not only in itself but also to reduce poverty. Furthermore, extending access to markets, basic public services and social assistance needs to be complemented with strengthening process legitimacy and social cohesion if inequality is to be reduced.