Resource Dependence and Political Risk Are Associated with Weaker Sustainable Development Performance in a Multicountry Panel

<title>Abstract</title> <p>This study examines how country risk and resource dependence are associated with sustainable-development performance. Using a country-year panel for 32 countries over the resource-complete period 2018--2023, the analysis models the SDG Index as a function of aggregate country risk, decomposed financial, economic, and political risk, natural-resource rents, and macroeconomic controls. Linear mixed-effects models account for repeated observations within countries, country-level heterogeneity, and country-specific development trajectories. Resource dependence is the most consistent negative association in the models. Natural-resource rents are negative in the aggregate and decomposed specifications and remain negative across first-order autoregressive residual-correlation checks, winsorization, shock-window exclusion, leave-one-country-out tests, recursive-residual diagnostics, and Mundlak within-between checks. Aggregate country risk has the expected negative sign but is not statistically significant after controls and country-level heterogeneity are included. The decomposed model identifies political risk as the relevant institutional component, while financial and economic risk are not statistically significant. Interaction tests do not support the claim that country risk has a stronger effect in more resource-dependent economies. The results support an operational SDG-monitoring approach in which governments track resource-rent exposure and political-risk indicators jointly, use these indicators to identify countries requiring priority diversification and governance intervention, and evaluate progress through repeated SDG and fiscal-management assessments.</p>