Towards Socially Sustainable Development: The Social Quality Approach
Mária Antalová, Iveta Fodranová, Viera Labudová, Mária Puškelová
Keywords:
social sustainable development, social quality, principal components, cluster analysis
Abstract:
Monitoring and assessing sustainable development necessitates establishing indicators focused on key societal aspects. While quantifying environmental and economic progress is relatively straightforward, the social domain faces challenges due to its lack of specificity and limited reporting capabilities. Consequently, this paper constructs a conceptual and methodological framework for evaluating social sustainable development by defining and implementing the concept of social quality. We applied and validated this novel methodology using data from European Union countries. The results of our study indicate significant variations in the implementation of social quality and its conditional factors among these countries. Denmark emerged with the highest level of social quality implementation, while Romania exhibited the lowest level. These disparities were observed across the four conditional factors of social quality: socio-economic security, social inclusion, social cohesion, and social empowerment. Additionally, our analysis revealed that differences in social quality implementation were not strictly aligned with traditional Western and Eastern bloc categorizations. Instead, we found mixed clusters of countries that did not conform to these regional divisions. This suggests that social quality dynamics are complex and influenced by various factors, highlighting the need for nuanced and context-specific approaches to improving social quality and sustainable development.
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 Towards Socially Sustainable Development: The Social Quality Approach [PDF file] [Filesize: 776.72 KB]
 10.7441/joc.2024.04.09
Antalová, M., Fodranová, I., Labudová, V., & Puškelová, M. (2024). Towards Socially Sustainable Development: The Social Quality Approach. Journal of Competitiveness, 16(4), 176-195. https://doi.org/10.7441/joc.2024.04.09
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