Since 2015, when the United Nations (UN) established the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the period 2015–2030, global attention has turned to sustainable development. However, few studies have focused on how countries can achieve sustainable development using comprehensive perspectives and quantitative approaches. In response to this gap, the current study adopts the Inclusive Wealth Index (IWI), which comprehensively evaluates the values of produced, natural, and human capitals that clearly contribute to the sustainable development of nations. By utilizing the IWI, this research carefully explores whether developing countries in the ASEAN region developed in a sustainable way during the period 1990 to 2014. We show that ASEAN countries with rich natural resources had difficulty developing sustainably. In contrast, other countries were able to overcome obstacles to sustainable development by enhancing produced capital, which was partly reflected in their relatively high GDP. To conserve wealth for the future generations, the management of capital resources in a way that reflects regional heterogeneity is key to achieving the SDGs in the ASEAN region.

Specialized suppliers to supermarkets in rural Java showed that smallholder farmers could engage in contract farming with the rise of retail modernization. This paper examines whether they have sustained contract farming with the recent decline of modernized stores. Our field survey, based on cases reported by the World Bank in 2006, provides the following findings: (1) Some suppliers failed to sustain contract farming due to growers’ hold-up problems; (2) The suppliers could prevent contract breaching by either undertaking contract-specific investments to train growers or provide inputs. Moreover, they selected growers based on their social reputation to avoid contract breaching; (3) We found that farmers in breach of contract farming on the modern channel begin to arrange farmers’ groups by themselves and return to the traditional channel as a new type of intermediaries. This indicates an evolution of the traditional marketing channel with the supermarket revolution.

Background: The decline in global and between-country health inequality is a major challenge to overcome. However, few studies have systematically investigated the relationship between inequality of health stock and national wealth. From an economic perspective, health can be viewed as a durable capital stock that produces an output of healthy time. Therefore, in this paper, we focused on health capital to investigate the relationship between inequalities of national health and national wealth. Methods: Based on health stock data from 1990 to 2015 for 140 countries, we estimated Gini coefficients of health stock to investigate associations with a well-known economic flow indicator, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), stock-based national wealth indicator, Inclusive Wealth Index (IWI), and firm-level net income. Results: The estimated Gini coefficient of global health stock shows that health stock has experienced a global decline. The Gini coefficient for low-income countries (LICs) showed the fastest decline in health stock, dropping from 0.69 to 0.66 in 25 years. Next, rapid population growth and the rise in the youth share of the working-age population in LICs were most likely contributing factors to the decline in inequality. Most countries that experienced positive health stock growth also indicated a strong positive relationship with GDP and IWI. However, some countries showed a negative relationship with natural capital, which is a part of IWI. In addition, firm-level net income showed no obvious associations with health stock, GDP and IWI. Conclusions: We argue that a negative relationship between health stock and natural capital is a sign of unstable development because sustainable development involves maintaining not only GDP but also IWI, as it is a collective set of assets or wealth comprising human, produced and natural capital. Moreover, in our analysis of firm-level income data, we also discuss that income will be influenced by other factors, such as innovations, human resources, organization culture and strategy. Therefore, the paper concludes that health stock is a vital component in measuring health inequality and health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thus, IWI is more comprehensive in measuring national wealth and can complement GDP in measuring progress toward sustainable development.