Sustainable Tourism Law

750 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW (iv) the assessment of trends in indicators plays a central issue in sustainability assessments. (v) a formal analysis of trends in indicators is an important part of a sustainability assessment, based on models or correlations, in terms of economic or econometric modelling or other types of modelling efforts. III. ASSESSING THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS – COMPOSITE INDICATORS The most important aspect concerning the SDI set is to know to what extent does the set of all indicator assessments shows whether society is moving towards sustainable development or not. Composite indicators (also known as synthetic indices or performance indices) are employed for many purposes and have become popular tools for assessing and ranking countries and institutions in terms of environmental performance, sustainability, and other complex concepts that may not be directly measurable (Becker et al., 2017). Over time, mainly over the past two decades, there has been a turbulent growth of composite performance indices proposed by different international institutions, mainly to assess country or sectorial performance aiming (e.g. the Human Development Index (UNDP), Environmental Sustainability Index (World Economic Forum), the Sustainable Society Index, the Financial Secrecy Index, the Good Country Index (GCI), Dashboard of Sustainability (EU) and the Environmental Performance Index). Compositeindicatorshavesomemainadvantages:(i)theirmultidimensionality represent an aggregate and relatively simple measure of a combination of components of complex phenomena: (ii) they synthesize complex or multidimensional issues in a way that facilitates evaluation and comparison; (iii) they are easier to interpret than a global battery of separate indicators; (iv) they facilitate the task of comparing the performance across countries and their progress over time; (v) they reduce the size of a list of indicators without losing basic information; (vi) they facilitate communication with general public and promote accountability (Saisana & Tarantola, 2002; Becker et al., 2017). On the other hand, these rankings of composite indicators may face some limitations (i) they still face several subjective choices in their construction which creates some perform uncertainty and sensitivity analysis on composite indicator