People can access and afford civil justice – Index (0-1, from low to high) 139 WJP Note: The sources listed above are GMD, Global Monitoring Database; AF, Afro Barometer; AB, Arab Barometer; ASB, Asian Barometer; LB, Latinobarómetro; WDI, World Development Indicators; WB, World Bank; WVS, World Values Survey; EMDAT, International Disaster Database; ACLED, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project; WJP, World Justice Project; WGI, World Governance Indicators.

Source: Social Sustainability Global Database 2022; Social Sustainability Global Database 2022 Codebook.

# **4. Results**

## **4.1 Indices**

Having constructed the global database, we next analyze how each component of social sustainability relates to poverty and income levels. Even a simple non-causal analysis can provide useful insights on, for example, countries’ ability to reduce poverty levels or how variation in levels of income translates into differences in the levels of inclusion and equality. A specific question is addressed in this section: _Is social sustainability unambiguously associated with reduced poverty levels and higher per capita income?_ To address this question, we create a set of indices for each of the four social sustainability components described earlier. Each of these indices includes equally weighted indicators that reflect the level of social inclusion, resilience, social cohesion, and process legitimacy in a given country. Including the selected indicators for each component allows for the largest number of countries in the empirical exercise while meaningfully covering different aspects between and within social sustainability components. We select these indicators following three criteria: (a) indictors capture outputs or outcomes that describe the level of the social sustainability dimension; (b) indicators are either objective or capture the perceptions of vulnerable groups; (c) indicators are univariate rather than capturing multiple and complex interactions between concepts. In other words, we avoid to the extent possible indicators capturing inputs or drivers; experts’ opinions on others’ social dimensions; and the indexing of indices. When it is not possible to adhere to all these three criteria—typically because of data constraints severely limiting the availability of indicators—we select well-documented, validated and reputed experts’ opinion sources and indices. Following the most parsimonious definition, each of the four indices weights its indicators equally. In practice, the index for each social sustainability component is defined at the national level. Constructed indices go from 0 to 1 and are monotonically built in such a way that lower values represent lower social sustainability.<sup>1</sup> We conducted robustness checks to see the sensitivity of results to the number of indicators used in each component, alternative choices of indicators across indices, and non-linear functional forms for the index. Alternative indices are also constructed using a geometric mean to aggregate indicators within the index so as to avoid the disproportionate influence of outlier observations. These checks confirm our findings are robust: most of our key findings do not change in terms of the direction and strength of correlations when the indices are constructed in alternative ways.

> 1 Whenever an indicator was originally defined in a negative manner, that is, a higher value captures lower social sustainability, the reverse of that indicator is used to construct our indices (that is, 1 minus its original value).

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