Causality between pillars of sustainable development: Global stylized facts or regional phenomena?

Since the Brundtland report, most governments have committed themselves to sustainable development. For this purpose, different global and national organizations and institutions have tried to find the relationships, and especially causalities, between sustainability pillars, which are interesting for them from a policy point of view. With respect to their findings, some questions need to be answered before appropriate policies can be formulated. Are causalities between sustainability pillars global stylized facts or regional phenomena? Can countries with different characteristics follow the same rules, or are causalities between the pillars sensitive to the regional and intrinsic features of countries? Using principal component analysis for the construction of sustainability indicators and the Granger causality model (GMM approach) for testing the causalities between sustainability pillars in different samples, this study finds that causal patterns among the pillars of sustainability are completely sensitive to the characteristics of the countries that are grouped. Therefore, it is recommended that researchers concentrate more on homogeneous case studies and avoid generalizations of causal relationships between sets of heterogeneous countries.