The impact of convergence and divergence in sustainable development: An international comparison

Rapid industrialization with null concern for environmental problems and tremendous increase in environmental pollution and the damage given to the ozone layer caused the environmental issues to gain a global dimension. As a consequence, the concept of sustainable development was used for the first time in the report for "World Protection Strategy" prepared by International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1980. In this report the concept of sustainable development is depicted as; a concept that is different from the classical development concept which aimed the satisfaction of the needs of people. The new concept not only includes the previous one but it also emphasizes the satisfaction of the needs of future generations by preserving the natural resources. From the beginnings of 1993 UN (United Nations) and OECD started to establish an indicator and data set for sustainable development. The aim of this thesis is to find out to what extend the OECD countries converged to the sustainability targets of UN and OECD. A data set composed of 132 indicators has been formed by making use of the 2019 OECD report "Measuring Distance to the SDG Targets 2019; An Assessment of Where OECD Countries Stand". Countries which scored several zero values are discarded. Thus out of 132 indicators 76 have been used. By making use of these 76 indicators we have tried to find out to what extend 32 OECD countries converged or diverged to the 17 sustainable development targets by making use of clustering analysis. The results show that 32 OECD countries have not converged on the sustainable development indicators. Keywords: Sustainable Development, Convergence, Divergence, Clustering Analysis, K-Means Method.