An Approach for Identifying a Global Core Indicator Set for Post-2030 International Development Goals

The global indicator framework for monitoring the progress of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) faces challenges such as insufficient data availability and comparability. However, fundamental changes to the SDG indicator framework are unlikely to occur by the SDG target year of 2030. An opportunity for improvements lies in the development of post-2030 international development goals. To contribute to future discussions on the post-2030 indicator framework, this study investigates how to address data availability and comparability issues. A suggested improvement is to develop a relatively small set of indicators, named “core indicators,” which are intended to reduce the data compilation burden for countries while enabling the monitoring of the overall progress of goals. To examine the feasibility of identifying the core indicators, this study undertook an analysis of official SDG data from 2000 to 2023, and selected 47 disaggregated indicators (DIs) utilizing statistical correlations between DI pairs. The analysis revealed that the 47 core DIs could produce country SDG progress scores similar to those calculated with a much larger dataset of 1112 DIs. The results indicated the usefulness of the proposed approach in selecting the core indicators for the post-2030 international development goals.