A New Sustainability City Index Based on Intellectual Capital Approach
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Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Plaza de la Universidad, 1, 02071 Albacete, Spain
2
Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ronda de Toledo, s/n, 13071 Ciudad Real, Spain
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editors: Gilles Lefebvre and Francisco J. Sáez-Martínez
Sustainability 2017, 9(5), 860; https://doi.org/10.3390/su9050860
Received: 19 March 2017
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Revised: 10 May 2017
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Accepted: 16 May 2017
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Published: 19 May 2017
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Sustainable Development: Selected Papers from 2016 Energy and Environment Knowledge Week)
Urban sustainability is a key factor that must be considered at the local level, however, there are few studies that consider sustainability using the triple bottom line approach and apply it to a large number of cities. In this paper, we develop a sustainability city index based on the triple bottom line using an intellectual capital approach that attempts to solve the negative aspects identified in the main indices proposed in the existing literature, such as the use of: subjective weightings, an arithmetic average or index that is not comparable. Here, we have used information available in the Urban Audit database for 2009. The results for 158 cities in 24 European countries show that the cities with the best positions are in the northern European countries. German cities occupied the best positions in the three dimensions of sustainability, albeit with a slightly worse performance in the social dimension. Moreover, the proposal index is consistent, without redundancy among the variables considered in the three dimensions.
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Keywords:
sustainability; city index; triple bottom line; intellectual capital; Europe
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Alfaro-Navarro, J.-L.; López-Ruiz, V.-R.; Peña, D.N. A New Sustainability City Index Based on Intellectual Capital Approach. Sustainability 2017, 9, 860. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9050860
AMA Style
Alfaro-Navarro J-L, López-Ruiz V-R, Peña DN. A New Sustainability City Index Based on Intellectual Capital Approach. Sustainability. 2017; 9(5):860. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9050860
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlfaro-Navarro, José-Luis, Víctor-Raúl López-Ruiz, and Domingo Nevado Peña. 2017. "A New Sustainability City Index Based on Intellectual Capital Approach" Sustainability 9, no. 5: 860. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9050860
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