Institutional Quality and the Prioritization of Sustainable Development: Perspectives From World Economies

ABSTRACT This paper benefits from strong versus weak government governance for prioritizing the progress of sustainable development projects via optimization algorithms. This paper constructs two indices, namely, the sustainable development index (SDI) score, which uses worldwide sustainable development goals, and the world governance index (WGII), which uses the six pillars of world governance indicators. The data include 193 countries over the period 2000–2022. The number of common projects among all countries is 49 projects. The paper further examines the duration effect, which is the span of time improvement in institutional quality has an impact on the progress of sustainable development projects. The general results show that (a) the impacts of government governance take a minimum of 5–6 years to have an impact on the progress of sustainable development projects, (b) corruption “greases the wheel” significantly, and (c) in terms of the priorities of sustainable projects, strong‐governance countries have rules and regulations that endorse a range of sustainable development projects wider (11 projects) than those offered by weak‐governance countries (six projects). The paper contributes to current related studies in terms of quantifying institutional quality to monitor, prioritize and progress sustainable development projects in every country. The constructed WGII scores offer a new approach for “quantifying Institutional Risks,” which further helps understand the impacts of institutional change on sustainable development projects.