Better Assessment of Progress of SDG 8 and Progress of all SDGs

Background: Methods of SDG index depicting progress and extent of sustainability achieved by normalizing the indicators and weighted sum suffer from limitations and lead to different rankings. Methods: The paper proposes multiplicatine aggregation to compute country-level Index for overall progress of SDG-8 and progress of all the 17 SDGs at global level. Results: The proposed index satisfies desirable properties and facilitates identification of critical targets requiring managerial attention for correcting policy measures, assessment of progress over time, distance from the SDG targets at a given time-point, testing statistical hypothesis of equality of for two different countries for a given year and also for equality of for two successive time points., plotting of progress path at country level and computing measure of similarity between such paths registered by a pair of countries. Conclusion: The proposed method of multiplicative aggregations without scaling and choosing weights offers significant benefits and contributes to improve aggregation of SDG avoiding major limitations of existing methods of aggregations, is recommended. Future studies suggested.