in: Loewe, Markus / Nicole Rippin (eds.), Translating an ambitious vision into global transformation: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, Bonn: German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), (Discussion Paper 7/2015), 51-58
ISBN: 978-3-88985-671-5
SDG 8 is a difficult goal, as it is vague and therefore under-ambitious. Most of its targets are formulated in a manner that makes it difficult to operationalise in a meaningful and manageable way.
In the medium term, per capita income growth and employment as indicators of socioeconomic progress should be replaced with new indicators and indices that measure the average progress of people across the multiple dimensions of their socio-economic wellbeing in their multidimensional socio-economic well-being. The Correlation Sensitive Poverty Index mentioned in the chapter on SDG 1 could be a good starting point for this purpose. It can be constructed in a way that allows the index to measure the mean of wellbeing of people in different countries in terms of their achievements / capabilities in different relevant dimensions. The advantage of the index is that it can capture different aspects of well-being and still account for inequalities.
In addition, the indicators suggested by the IAEG-SDGs could be complemented by additional ones that are able to control for the inclusiveness and sustainability of growth.