Method and Criteria for Assessing Sustainable Development

The article is aimed at solving the urgent scientific task of creating new methods for an integrated assessment of the sustainable development of socio-economic objects, in particular, countries, regions and cities. A practical method of assessment is proposed, which allows to form ideas about the vector of sustainable development of objects. The construction of development models is based on the use of the principle of the corresponding states, according to which the positions of objects in multidimensional state spaces can be described by a single equation if an effective scale is constructed for comparing the states among themselves in a set of indicators. It is shown that the study of the features of sustainable development of countries, regions and cities can be performed by the method of cluster analysis of data with the subsequent construction of such scales. For comparison of objects it is suggested to use the reference vector of development, which is constructed for the control group of objects that are the most developed in terms of indicators of achieving the goals of sustainable development. Socio-econometric scales are proposed for assessing the development of regions, as well as criteria characterizing the stability of their development. As a realization of the method, a comparative analysis of the development of the regions of Russia on 13 indicators of sustainable development was carried out.