The achievement of a sustainable economic growth is one of the main concerns of modern societies. A plurality of approaches to the definition of sustainability exists, yet, sustainability often remains a theoretical concept, whose application in concrete policy making is limited. Countries are usually evaluated and compared in their performance using their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the main indicator. However, GDP is limited to consider economic growth, and it does not consider over valuable information such social wealth, environmental conditions, or happiness.  The need to go "beyond the GDP" to assess and compare the performance of different countries towards a sustainable growth has lead to the construction of different indicators and indices. These can contribute to quantitatively address the abstract concept of sustainability. However, they are often hard to reconduct to policy objectives and recommendations.

The objective of this workshop is to compare different indices, indicators, and approaches taken to assess sustainability. We aim at comparing frameworks, construction methodologies, and computational techniques used to quantify sustainability.

Three main topics will be considered:

  • The definition of sustainability and the use of indicators and aggregate indices to quantify it;
  • The approaches taken to quantify sustainability: comparison of different methodologies for the aggregation and construction of indicators;
  • The operationalization of sustainability: construction of indicators and indices within applied economic models, projections of sustainability, and policy studies.