A canonical correlation analysis of the relationship between sustainability and competitiveness

作者：dos Santos Silvio Francisco; Brandi Humberto Siqueira^*

来源：Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, 2014, 16(8): 1735-1746.

DOI：10.1007/s10098-014-0755-2

• Sustainability
• Sustainability metrics
• Competitiveness
• Canonical correlation analysis
• Aggregation

In the present work, we apply the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to analyze the relationship between competitiveness and environmental sustainability, studying their degree of correlation and the impact of the environmental sustainability and competitiveness indicators in this relationship. We selected seven indicators from the environmental sustainability indicators of the Environmental Performance Index, and 12 competitiveness indicators from The Global Competitiveness Index. The CCA considers 117 countries common in both databases. The method is applied to study of the intracorrelations (correlations, between the same set of indicators) and the intercorrelations (correlations between the sustainability and competitiveness sets of indicators). It is shown that the intracorrelations of the environmental and competitiveness indicators are highly correlated, indicating that the choice of the indicators adequately describes sustainability and competitiveness, separately. For the study of the intercorrelation between the sustainability and the competitiveness sets of indicators, the CCA method reduced the complex multidimensional problem to a one-dimensional situation described by one relevant canonical function. This greatly simplified the interpretation of the interrelation between competitiveness and sustainability indicators allowing a proper analysis of the different degrees of correlation between these dimensions. A discussion on the degree of correlation between these indicators is presented. The results associating competitiveness and sustainability indicators through strong intercorrelation are an indication that the conclusion of the World Economic Forum analysis "the main and very important finding is that there is no necessary trade-off between being competitive and being sustainable. On the contrary, many countries at the top of the competitiveness rankings are also the best performers in many areas of sustainability," may be related to the specific choice of indicators. The present study suggests that the strongly correlated indicators are good candidates to be part of an adequate set of composite sustainability and competitiveness indicators. Although in this work CCA is applied to study the environmental sustainability, the method can be applied to investigate other metrics in particular the intersection of social and competitiveness toward the achievement of sustainable development.

• 出版日期2014-12