Evaluating industrial sustainability in OECD countries: A cross-country comparison

Abstract The negative impacts associated to industrial activities have lead policymakers and scholars to elaborate broad interventions for sustainable and circular growth. These strategies entail the participation of a multitude of actors, each of whom is responsible for the achievement of different industrial sustainability and circular economy targets. A successful implementation of these strategies must be based on robust measurement systems, evaluating both policy implementation process and its outcomes. With this purpose, the aim of this paper is to present a novel approach for industrial sector performance, with respect to sustainability and circular economy. In doing so, by exploiting an OECD procedure, we built an Industrial Sustainability Index and four sub-indices evaluating different aspects of industrial sustainability and circular economy interventions: inputs, firm activities, outputs and resource efficiency outcomes. Furthermore, a scenario based on a Disparity Index has been used to evaluate the distance of each statistical observation from an efficient solution. This methodology has been tested on 36 OECD countries. The proposed approach allows policymakers to easily identify both weaknesses and best practices of the whole system and, thus, balance policy interventions according to the punctual needing of sectors, aspects or actors.