Designing the spatial spillovers of sustainable development between the eastern and western countries: Analyzing the integrated sustainability perspective

There are various perspectives of sustainability, including integrated sustainability, weak sustainability, and strong sustainability, complicating the understanding of the perspective fitting the socioeconomic characteristics of each group of countries. To address this research gap, the main objective of the study is to examine the three perspectives of sustainability across the US, China, and Indonesia to reveal their most dominant sustainability perspective. To this end, it maps the spatial spillovers of sustainability pillars, including social, environment, and economy, within the sample countries. For this mapping, this approach estimates the sustainability elasticities using the SEY model, which involves the Vector Autoregression (VAR), simultaneous equations system, and causal examination, within 1974–2020. The results indicate that the elasticities of sustainability are mainly high and synergistic, meaning that the sustainability pillars mainly have considerable and synergistic spillover effects. This finding accepts the integrated sustainability while refusing the perspectives of strong and weak sustainability. Moreover, the findings denote that the flowing patten of spillovers have a spatially symmetric distribution between the US and China, attaching equal importance to the relationships with the western and eastern economies of the world. The theoretical implication of the findings is that they introduce spillovers as the 4th dimension of sustainability, completing the three classical dimensions of economy, environment, and social in the context of the weak and strong perspective of sustainability. From the perspective of policy recommendation, the findings suggest decision-makers in Indonesia to promote peaceful, strong, and balanced ties with the great economic powers in the west and the east like the US and China.