A country’s process of development as described by a butterfly catastrophe model. The case of European South

For a long period of time a country’s development has been synonymous with its economic growth. Over the last years, however, economies and societies have been undergoing dramatic changes. These changes have led to the concept of sustainable development, which refers to the ability of our societies to meet the needs of the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Measuring sustainable development means going beyond a purely economic description of human activities; requires integration of economic, social and environmental concerns. New techniques are required in order to benchmark performance, highlight leaders and laggards on various aspects of development and facilitate efforts to identify best practices. New tools have to be designed so as to make sustainability decision-making more objective, systematic and rigorous. The majority of those methodologies make use of a single indicator in order to measure separately the evolution of each component i.e. the economic, the social and the environmental. Our objective in the present paper is to:
- Outline the process of a country’s development taking into account all its three dimensions, economic, social and environmental.
- Present a model for quantifying its process of development encompassing all those dimensions.
- Apply the model to European South countries.
- Discuss the results.