Sustainability in the Economy through the Achievement of Gender Equality
A Study on Asian Countries
Abstract
The discussion of Triple Bottom Line (TBL) is now at the highest priority level as the countries are trying to reach their level of targeted sustainability. While environmental, Social and Governmental (ESG) issues are now focussed more on measurable criteria, the requirement of research based on ESG and sustainability has come to forefront. On this context, the pillars of Triple Bottom Line (TBL) emphasise on finding the justification on people, planet and profit with aligning the objectives of ESG. The parameters of ESG are dealing with the economic indicators, social indicators and governance indicators of the respective countries. Based on this, the current study extracts prominent variables from each framework and tries to ascertain the conceptual theories behind the same. On one hand, previous studies have focussed on finding the relationship among the three pillars of ESG with respect to extraneous variables, while, on the other hand, our current research focuses on finding the impact of economic pillar on the social pillar in Asian economies. The uniqueness of the current research, thus, is that it finds the impact inside the Triple Bottom Line whereas, the previous studies have concentrated the influence of TBL on the other external variables. Thus, the requirement of TBL to be discovered as independent factors’ effect has been the major focus of the study. Here, the article tries to focus on the impact of economic growth (SDG) on two of the social pillars, i.e., gender equality (SDG) and hunger valuation (SDG). During the analysis, the key focus of the study was to extract the importance of gender sensitivity along with hunger assessment to promote sustainability in economies. As the poverty remains the maximum concern for Asian economies, the study choses countries as China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Korea for the data analysis. As these five economies are prominent in their development path, they strive towards sustainable economy considering reaching all the pillars of their respective goals. But unfortunately, the basic hindrance remains as poverty in these countries. Eradicating poverty will overcome the difficulties towards smooth sustainable transition for them. Thus, the research focuses on formulating short run and long run strategies for the countries to reach zero hunger (SDG) by focussing on gender equality, hunger index and economic growth. Also, it directs to emphasise gender equality primarily in Asian nations to channelise ultimate development towards sustainable path.