Abstract:

Nowadays, sustainable development is one of the most popular concepts among researchers of multiple scientific disciplines, including economics, management, political science and administration, sociology, technical science and the science of security. The reason for this is the broad scope and interdisciplinarity of the concept. Several hundred indicators describing sustainable development are classified under the so called ‘four orders’, namely: social order, economic order, environmental order and political-institutional order. The subject of analysis in this paper is economic order. A comparative analysis of sustainable development in the category of economic order at the regional level has been carried out. A comparison of the level of implementation of the guidelines for economic order in Polish provinces has been made.

The following research questions were formulated:

Q1: What are the methods to apply in order to assess the level of sustainable development in the light of the plethora of the strategic goals of sustainable development and the implementation indicators of these goals;

Q2: Do Polish provinces implement the assumptions of the sustainable development strategy with comparable efficiency.

During the research work, the following hypotheses were formulated:

H1: The objects under research show significant differences in terms of the taxonomic distances between the synthetic measure of development which confirms the validity of applying the multidimensional analysis for measuring the levels of sustainable development;

H2: Polish provinces differ significantly in terms of the level of sustainable development in the category of economic order.

The aim of this article is to objectively measure the progress in the implementation of the goals of the sustainable development strategy in the category of economic order by Polish provinces. In this case, the expression ‘objectively’ means embracing the advances in implementing all the goals within one single synthetic measure. This means that the assessment of the level of sustainable development in the category of economic order in particular provinces was carried out using a simultaneous analysis into the multiple aspects of this development. In order to meet the formulated goal, a synthetic measure (reflecting the plethora of sustainable development indicators) was built (using taxonomic analysis methods) with a view to defining the implementation level of the goals formulated in the sustainable development strategy in the category of economic order. The values adopted by the measure allowed creating a ranking of all the provinces under investigation in terms of their advancement in the implementation of the goals of sustainable development in the category of economic order.