Xavier Rambla Sociologia

The current agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals takes into consideration the complexity of interactions between the goals. Actually, a growing movement of opinion is challenging the silo structure of the Millennium Development Goals.

A cursory exploration of some well-known regularities shows that these connections do not reproduce the same correlations everywhere at any time, but that important variations are easily observed.

Firstly, Samuel H. Preston’s curve shows that the relationship between income and life expectancy varies for low- and high-income countries. Although a correlation is established among low-income countries, it is not among high-income ones. Moreover, the curve moves upwards over time at the same time as life expectancy rises everywhere. The Gap Minder website not only shows these trends, but it also allows us to explore the situation in the nineteenth century. Remarkably, in many countries at that time economic growth did not impact on life expectancy (here).

Secondly, the correlation between income and mean years of schooling is much more linear. The correlation is similar for male and female populations, but there are some slight differences that should be taken into account carefully (here and here).

But if the range of variables is expanded, some variations are also noticeable. To start with, among low-income countries there is no correlation between income and the number of out-of-school children (here).

In addition, among middle-income PISA countries some correlation is noticeable between income and reading scores, but this correlation is much weaker among high-income PISA countries (here).