Supplementary Information: The Sustainable Development Oxymoron: Quantifying and Modelling the Incompatibility of Sustainable Development Goals

The comprehensive World Bank API dataset of 1364 indicators covers indicators on agriculture, trade and investment, imports and exports, economic performance, IT infrastructure, remittances, capital and financial sector, debts and savings, development aid, water pollution, energy sector (including sustainable energy production), greenhouse gases and other pollutants emissions, threatened species (though the data is practically not usable due to incompleteness), population and demography, sanitation, terrestrial and marine protected area, taxes, government expenses, household and national consumption expenditure, business activities and regulations, innovation (patent application etc.), transport and transport infrastructure, industry, education (including literacy rate), gender equality, health and health infrastructure, nutrition, poverty, inequality, labour and employment, migration and refugees, urbanization, tourism and finally governance (including corruption, rule of law, etc.) (World Bank Development Data Group, 2010, 2014; Kaufmann et al., 2010). As noted in the main text, to this World Bank dataset we have added datasets from Polity IV containing measures on democracy vs. autocracy and regime durability (Marshall et al., 2014), CIRI Human Rights Data Project containing various human rights indices, such as the physical integrity rights index consisting of measures that count the cases of disappearance, extra-judicial killing, political imprisonment and torture in a country (Cingranelli et al., 2013), Centre for Systemic Peace data containing data on conflicts (interstate wars, civil wars, etc.), state fragility, governance (effectiveness and legitimacy in security, politics, economy and social matters), (Marshall, 2014), Forcibly Displaces Populations Data provided by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigration (USCRI) and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and compiled by the Centre for Systemic Peace (Marshall and Cole, 2014), the Freedom House data containing the indices for political and civil rights as well as freedom of press (Freedom House, 2014a,b) and the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal data containing measures on economic freedom, such as property rights, freedom from corruption, fiscal freedom, government spending, business freedom, labor freedom, trade freedom, investment freedom and financial freedom (Miller et al., 2014). The quality of these datasets is usually considerably good, given dedicated research groups work on producing and maintaining these datasets, but the time coverage varies significantly. The combined dataset (including the World Bank dataset) consists of 1423 economic, social, political and environmental indicators for 217 countries covering the years 1980 to 2014. One of the major challenges to a data-driven analysis of the SDGs is that the currently available data is still quite incomplete. The data quality varies considerably with some indicators such as GDP having almost complete data coverage, and others having hardly any data coverage at all (e.g. environmental indicators but also some poverty indicators) at least if one is interested in dynamical (time series) analysis. While we started with 1423 indicators, we finally could use only 233. Partly the reduction is due to conceptual duplicates, for instance, GDP per capita is given multiple times, as GDP per capita can be measured in current and constant 2005 US $, in current and constant 2011 international $, in current and constant local currency, etc. We removed all duplicates, aiming at using consistent measures. For instance, we always used current US $ for monetary measures. But quite often we had to remove indices because they had too many missing values, e.g. 80% even after interpolation, which would inhibit any reasonable modelling attempts.