Index on relative sustainability impact-a suggestive tool for strengthening regional cooperation : case of South Asia

Partnership and cooperation remain the essence of United Nations 2030 (UN2030) Agenda. However, the regional cooperation framework often lacks comprehensive economic analysis and estimation of probabilistic impacts of any country's socio-economic and environmental activities on the people and ecosystems of other countries. This study attempts to develop an index on a country-pair basis that elucidates six channels of bilateral cooperation and respective strengths of those: trade, technological advancement, labors' productivity, regional interconnectedness, human development, and emission management. Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC) objective weighting method is applied for multi-criteria decision-making. Empirical analysis encompasses all South Asian countries. Results show that India remains the country with the highest impact on the other countries in this South Asian region followed by Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Bhutan, Afghanistan and the Maldives have the highest probability of attaining the gain from other South Asian countries. The study also analyzes countries' component-wise strengths of bilateral impacts.