Md Muhtasim Munif Fahim, Md Jahid Hasan Imran, Luknath Debnath, Tonmoy Shill, Md. Naim Molla, Ehsanul Bashar Pranto, Md Shafin Sanyan Saad, Md Rezaul Karim
arXiv 19 Jan 2026 · Statistics — Applications
arXiv:2601.20875 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
The achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is dependent upon strategic resource distribution. We propose a causal discovery framework using Panel Vector Autoregression, along with both country-specific fixed effects and PCMCI+ conditional independence testing on 168 countries (2000-2025) to develop the first complete causal architecture of SDG dependencies. Utilizing 8 strategically chosen SDGs, we identify a distributed causal network (i.e., no single 'hub' SDG), with 10 statistically significant Granger-causal relationships identified as 11 unique direct effects. Education to Inequality is identified as the most statistically significant direct relationship (r = -0.599; p < 0.05), while effect magnitude significantly varies depending on income levels (e.g., high-income: r = -0.65; lower-middle-income: r = -0.06; non-significant). We also reject the idea that there exists a single 'keystone' SDG. Additionally, we offer a proposed tiered priority framework for the SDGs namely, identifying upstream drivers (Education, Growth), enabling goals (Institutions, Energy), and downstream outcomes (Poverty, Health). Therefore, we conclude that effective SDG acceleration can be accomplished through coordinated multi-dimensional intervention(s), and that single-goal sequential strategies are insufficient.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sachs, Jeffrey D and Kroll, Christian and Lafortune, Guillaume and F… (2025) Sustainable Development Report 2025 | 1.000 | 5 | 4 | 100% |
| 2 | Pradhan, Prajal and Costa, Luis and Rybski, Diego and Lucht, Wolfgan… (2017) A systematic study of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) interactions | 0.928 | 4 | 3 | 100% |
| 3 | Nilsson, Mans and Griggs, David and Visbeck, Martin (2016) Map the interactions between Sustainable Development Goals | 0.843 | 3 | 3 | 100% |
| 4 | United Nations (2015) Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development | 0.843 | 3 | 3 | 100% |
| 5 | Runge, Jakob (2020) Discovering contemporaneous and lagged causal relations in autocorrelated nonlinear time series datasets | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Schmidt-Traub, Guido and Kroll, Christian and Teksoz, Katerina and D… (2017) National baselines for the Sustainable Development Goals assessed in the SDG Index and Dashboards | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | Granger, Clive WJ (1969) Investigating causal relations by econometric models and cross-spectral methods | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 8 | International Council for Science (2017) A guide to SDG interactions: From science to implementation | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 9 | Sachs, Jeffrey D and Schmidt-Traub, Guido and Mazzucato, Mariana and… (2019) Six transformations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 10 | Sims, Christopher A (1980) Macroeconomics and reality | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
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