Measuring Sustainability: A Review

The definition of sustainable development to be promoted by international organizations calls for a complex theoretical framework to allow policy makers to achieve rational choices taking due account of the limited environmental assets. The ideal tool instrument to evaluate the sustainability of national policies is an aggregated macroeconomic indicator representing traditional income measurements in terms of sustainability. The United Nations and the World Bank have developed the most widely adopted indicators, at the level of environmental income and sustainable saving, although these indicators need further enhancement in order to build a useful index for planning and evaluating national policies.