An axiomatic approach to measure the ‘Leave no one behind’ principle

‘Leave no one behind’ has become an important principle of the entire 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals that brings inequality to the centre stage. Although a precise definition of what it is to lag behind is essential to assess sustainable economic growth and social progress a discussion on the desirable properties of such a measure is absent in the literature. This paper fills that gap by proposing and discussing a number of normative and analytical properties a measure of the ‘Leave no one behind’ principle should satisfy. The axioms proposed are necessary and sufficient to characterize the fuzzy measure by García-Pardo et al. [8] and together with other additional axioms make the structure of this measure more transparent.