Macroeconomic SDG Forecasts for the KSA

Developing macroeconomic SDG by SDG forecasts as well as the SDG interlinkages/integrated approach draws on a methodology of nearest neighbour matching and utilizes Sachs et al. Sustainable Development Report SDG Index data (updated yearly) to build internationally comparable SDG by SDG (for all 17) scores across time, by a variety of methods including data substitution techniques, normalizations, index theory, and aggregation. Then, the nearest neighbour methodology identifies which countries in 2010 were in the most similar position to a country of focus in 2020 across all 17 goals – the nearest neighbours (NN) – implying maximum similarity to our country of focus in each SDG separately. For the SDG by SDG macroeconomic forecasts, we can then determine the top and bottom performers out of the NNs, which implies the countries in those groups have either had a good policy mix or a bad policy mix. The top NNs are where we can then look in detail to see what policies were applied in the decade preceding our analysis, which gives us a good indication of the potentially best policies to be localized to our focus country for maximum SDG by SDG acceleration.