The interlinkages and integrated nature of the Sustainable Development Goals are of crucial importance in ensuring that the purpose of the new Agenda is realized. Most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have the potential to bring progress in other SDGs, but some of these synergies are stronger than others. At the same time, advancement in some goals could negatively affect progress in other areas without careful policy design. The present work provides a comprehensive literature review both of the methodologies that have been employed to study the phenomenon and of the results that have been obtained through the analysis of the specific SDGs.Moreover, applying the most suited methodology and relying on more than 150 elementary indicators related to all the SDGs, the paper focuses on the Italian Regions, in order to study the correlation between the Goals and to check if the quantitative results are aligned with those presented in literature referring to other Countries.From the policy perspective, this exercise is crucial: actually, starting from the business-as-usual scenarios that traditionally depict the development of the socio-economic systems without considering the introduction of new policies, we only consider a reference benchmark, a macro-dimension of the specific SDG. On the other side, the policy counterfactuals provide the ex-ante assessment of costs and benefits of planned actions and strategies aimed to achieve the SDGs, as well as their feasibility and potential trade-offs/interactions with other sustainability dimensions not directly considered by the policy intervention.

The interlinkages and integrated nature of the Sustainable Development Goals are of crucial importance in ensuring that the purpose of the new Agenda is realized. Most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have the potential to bring progress in other SDGs, but some of these synergies are stronger than others. At the same time, advancement in some goals could negatively affect progress in other areas without careful policy design. The present work provides a comprehensive literature review both of the methodologies that have been employed to study the phenomenon and of the results that have been obtained through the analysis of the specific SDGs. Moreover, applying the most suited methodology and relying on more than 150 elementary indicators related to all the SDGs, the paper focuses on the Italian Regions, in order to study the correlation between the Goals and to check if the quantitative results are aligned with those presented in literature referring to other Countries. From the policy perspective, this exercise is crucial: actually, starting from the business-as-usual scenarios that traditionally depict the development of the socio-economic systems without considering the introduction of new policies, we only consider a reference benchmark, a macro-dimension of the specific SDG. On the other side, the policy counterfactuals provide the ex-ante assessment of costs and benefits of planned actions and strategies aimed to achieve the SDGs, as well as their feasibility and potential trade-offs/interactions with other sustainability dimensions not directly considered by the policy intervention.