Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper demonstrated sustainability assessment for five autonomous regions in China by applying GRA and SPA method using 24 indicators in the economic, social and environmental domains. The employed method allowed to use of objective weights for indicators to aggregate normalized scores of the indicators and to show trends of the performances.

The study well reviewed the past literature and deonstrate regorous method for estimation. Before publication, I would like the authors to address the following comments.

1. Though the manuscript reviewed sufficiently past studies, the current form of the manuscript would better clarify the major contribution of the sustainability assessment literature.
2. In line with this, sensitivity analyses using equal weights among indicators (for example), could possibly yield insights into your assessment approach.
3. Equations (1) and (2) can read you subtract the score of indicator i of Province j in time k from the maximum value of indicator i of Province j in time k. If this is so, comparison across different time periods may not hold. I think the maximum value should be the maximum one in all time. Is it is not so, then the equations (1) and (2) should be rewritten.

Minor point: the letter used in the equations can be simpler.

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thank you !

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper presents a lot of data and statistical work. The paper aims to assess the sustainability of autonomous regions in China.

As an international reader, I found this research has some problems need to be addressed:

The paper does not present the importance of this research. It seems the author(s) has tried to, but it is not sounds for me. Why autonomous regions were selected? How to select? The author(s) has just presented a government policy, which is not enough to showcase the importance of this research. 

The introduction of the article spent a lot of time discussing the GRA-SPA method. However, the author(s) has failed to fully explain how GRA-SPA method is related to sustainability and why sustainability needs to be studied with GRA-SPA method. Without being fully explained, this research is just 'garbage in, garbage out' for readers.

In the methods, the author(s) has failed to explain how the project was selected. These facts need to be discussed in the introduction. Since the author(s) has not made an in-depth discussion, the reader is not clear about the measures used and the characteristics of the measurements.

The data analysis section is unknown.

The recruitment is not well reported in the manuscript as well as the data collection procedures. 

I also miss a sound scientific discussion.

I have a big issue with the causality of the sustainability and the method.
The discussion and conclusion also did not provide a sound scientific discussion. How do they relate to the results? What conclusions does the author(s) draw? Before it is cleared, I cannot accept the study and step on into further details. 

To conclude, the article under review covers an interesting subject. The writing may work for other periodicals. Due to lack of a sound aim, research design and discussion, the article does not make a good candidate for publication in a Wed of Science indexed academic journal such as Sustainability.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.Thank you!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Sustainability is an important issue for China, as the country tries to balance competing priorities. The paper is to evaluate the sustainability development of the five autonomous regions in China from 2010 to 2019. While I like the original idea of the paper, I have serious questions:

1. The unit of analysis seems to be at the autonomous region level. Is this too large? There are many counties within each of the autonomous region, which may have very different sustainability profiles.

2. Why are other provinces excluded from this study? It would be useful to include at least some as references.

3. Why are there large increases and decreases in the sustainability performance shown in Figure 4? Why are there substantial changes year over year? Are the numbers reported in Table 4 statistically significant?

4. There may be missing words. One example is in the abstract. “Accounting for 40%” of what? Table 4 seems to have some formatting issues. 

5. Why are the weights changed over time in Figure 3?

6. It is still unclear to me how the GRA method is paired with SPA. How is this combined method superior?

7. What are “positive ideal points in the grey system”?

8. What are the theoretical contribution of this paper to the literature? What new have we learned? 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.Thank you!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

My questions have been addressed and I am happy to accept this paper.