Links between the sustainable development goals: An analysis for Italy

Abstract The article reviews the links between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), examining how progress in one is related to the others and what factors determine the progress. While most previous work is at the national level, this article focusses at the sub‐national level for one country, namely Italy. After reviewing the evidence from the literature, the paper utilizes an unbalanced panel data collected for Italian provinces, covering the period 2004–2022 and reports descriptive statistics. On the positive side, we see a decline in ambient air pollution, and an increase in indicators of gender equality. There are also big gains in tertiary education and a decline in occupational injuries. These are common to almost all provinces. On the health side, life expectancy has risen across the country. Less positive are the changes in endocrine, metabolic, and nutrition disease rates and in availability of hospital beds. The inter‐province indicator of inequality has also increased. Furthermore, the overall level of inequality has gone up and the difference in inequality between provinces has not fallen. There has been no increase in green spaces or efficiency of courts. There has been progress in poverty reduction but not enough to meet the SDG target by 2030 and regional differences in poverty remain stark. The Italian data are subjected to estimation of causal linkages between indicators using a system of equations. Two‐stage least squares estimation is carried out on the panel data set for provinces in Italy. The empirical modeling finds a positive impact of wealth on life expectancy and of income on poverty. There is an effect of an increase in income on poverty at the sub‐national level. There is also a negative impact of NGOs on land under construction, which is something not observed elsewhere as far as we are aware.