Multi-country SDGs indicator projections involving impacts of economic shocks: A protocol applied to the COVID-19 pandemic for ASEAN-5 countries

Economies often experience large shocks, necessitating the revision of development indicator forecasts, including Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators. Many of those, predicted for 2030, require continued monitoring and re-estimation of how great the impact of these shocks will be, e.g., comparing the achievements with and without the shocks (counterfactual). In this paper, we design a protocol to create datasets containing 2030 SDGs indicator projection estimates that can be used to monitor the extent to which current economic shocks will affect the trajectories of those indicators. We combine official United Nations Statistics Division (UNSTAT) SDGs indicator data and economic growth projections data and fit them into the protocol. The protocol includes filtering UNSTAT SDGs indicators for regression analysis connecting them with economic growth. We assume that the difference in economic growth projections before and after a shock is primarily caused by the shock. This implies that our protocol is less suitable for an episode of more subtle shocks or shocks with multiple causes. We use these estimates to create the SDGs indicators projection dataset. We applied this to ASEAN-5 countries and the COVID-19 pandemic. The same protocol can be used for other countries as well as other economic shocks. • The protocol is useful to monitor how previous projection trajectories of SDGs indicators are affected by relevant large economic shocks, such as those due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulted dataset can also be used for comparing achievements, with and without shocks (counterfactual). • This protocol can be used by national and international agencies, especially those in charge of planning, monitoring, and evaluating the SDGs agenda. The protocol and the resulting data would also be helpful to researchers working on SDGs issues. • In this paper, the protocol to create the projection dataset of SDGs applies for the ASEAN-5 countries using the COVID-19 shocks. These can also be applied for other countries and other economic shocks.