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Sustainable Economic Development Assessment and Citizen Well-Being

Explore BCG’s Sustainable Economic Development Assessment (SEDA) to gain insight into your country’s overall social and economic conditions.

 

What Is SEDA?

Without a doubt, there is a connection between a country’s wealth and economic growth and improvements to its overall well-being. So rather than focusing solely on GDP per capita—the most frequently used indicator of a country’s general welfare—BCG designed SEDA, a proprietary diagnostic tool built to objectively measure a country‘s sustainable economic growth and citizen well-being.

SEDA combines data on outcomes (such as health and education) with quasi-objective data (such as governance assessments). It also assesses how a country performs relative either to the entire universe of 143 countries or to individual peers or groups.

SEDA offers a current snapshot of a country’s sustainable economic development assessment ranking as well as a measure of progress over time, and it complements purely economic indicators like GDP. However, SEDA doesn’t include purely subjective measures. Other metrics based on subjective measures—such as the ones used in the UN’s Happiness Report—offer valuable complementary, but separate, analyses. In fact, BCG has found a strong overall positive correlation between the UN’s Happiness scores and SEDA scores.

Read the Latest SEDA Report Series


How Does SEDA Define Well-Being?

SEDA defines well-being on the basis of ten dimensions grouped into three categories:

  • Economics. Including the dimensions of income, economic stability, and employment.
  • Investments. Including the dimensions of education, health, and infrastructure, which reflect the outcomes of policies and programs that account for the bulk of any government’s nondefense expenditures.
  • Sustainability. Comprises the environment and three contributors to social inclusion: equality, a strong civil society, and sound governance.


How Does SEDA Economic Development Provide Insight into Well-Being?

Using indicators from publicly available sources, SEDA assesses country performance for each dimension. The assessment relies on a total of 40 indicators based on the most recently available data. Each indicator’s measure is normalized on a scale of 0 (the lowest) to 100 (the highest). On the basis of those normalized indicators, a score is calculated for each of the ten dimensions. The scores provide insight into well-being in three ways:

SEDA Score

Change in SEDA Score

Wealth to Well-Being Coefficient

Meet BCG’s SEDA and Citizen Well-Being Experts


Explore Our SEDA BCG Reports Over the Years

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