Evaluating the sustained development of socio-economic systems

The conventional approach to assessing the developmental level of any socioeconomic system (SES) is to consider only its state in a given year. However, this approach does not adequately reflect the dynamic and complex nature of SES, which are inherently unstable due to their inertia. In other words, the development indicators at any point in time (year) of the considered period (CP) largely depend on the results of the development that occurred in the previous periods. This makes it difficult to adequately quantify the development of SES over a specific period. This paper presents a novel methodology for obtaining the SES sustained development index by combining the values of two parameters – intensity and uniformity. Since the former must take into account the totality of both positive and negative changes that occurred during the CP, correlation regression analysis is used to calculate the values. The latter is reflected by the value relationships of actual changes in individual periods of CP with SES development taking place without any deviations. Given that the importance of intensity and uniformity for sustained development is not the same, multi-criteria method is used to combine the values in a representative manner.