Beyond Ambitious Goals

This dataset supports the analysis presented in the article “Beyond Ambitious Goals: Unveiling the True Drivers of Countries' Sustainable Development Performance.” It contains cross-sectional data used to estimate the relationship between countries' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) performance and key explanatory variables, namely the Economic Complexity Index (ECI), Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and institutional indicators from the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI): Rule of Law, Regulatory Quality, and Control of Corruption. The dataset includes observations for 119 countries, with variables normalized for comparability. The SDG score corresponds to the projected 2024 Sustainable Development Index by UN DESA, while the ECI is normalized on a 0–100 scale based on the Growth Lab’s rankings. All variables are included in the multivariate OLS regression models discussed in the manuscript. This dataset can be used for replication purposes and further analysis of the determinants of sustainable development performance across nations.