Social Safety of Society for Developing Countries to Meet Sustainable Development Standards: Indicators, Level, Strategic Benchmarks (with Calculations Based on the Case Study of Ukraine)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The efforts of the authors to improve and clarify the “Materials and Methods” section is appreciated. I took very careful examination of the references and empirical work presented in this paper to determine its scientific contribution, following the rationale that value added in socio-economic research paper is stemming either from the development of new methodology, major adjustment of existing methodology or application of existing methodology to the new sample. The first two cases can be obviously dismissed, since the methodology has been already developed and published in ref. [52], and applied in this paper without major modifications.

Hence, the existing methodology has been applied to calculate thresholds for the three indicators’ group of social safety: standard of living, demographic component and quality of life, and then to position Ukraine with respect to the thresholds. The empirical work on this subject for the first indicator group “standard of living” is not original work; it has been already published in ref. [61]. The first panel of the Table 2 in this paper is identical as Table 1 in ref. [61], so this is a case of auto-plagiarism and obviously not a value added.

So, the only possible source of value added is application of existing methodology to demographic component and quality of life indicators. However, methodology of threshold values’ determination is based on the concept of "homeostatic plateau", which according to the illustration in Figure 1 assumes “system breakdown” both below lower and above upper threshold value. The rationale of having lower and upper thresholds may holds for economic variables, like rate of healthcare spending to output: rate too low is detrimental for healthcare, rate too high overcrowds other social expenses. But when applied to demographic component and quality of life indicators, it has no elementary logic. What is the rationale, for instance, of having upper threshold 2.6 (Table 2) in case of infant mortality rate (deaths of those aged under 1 year per 1,000 live births)? That infant mortality rate lower than 2.6 is detrimental for the social safety? Subsequently, I could not consider mechanical application of existing methodology on demographic component and quality of life indicators as value added.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your time and valuable comments.

A Point-by-Point Response to Reviewer 1 is attached.

Best regards,

The authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper developes a system of indicators for the social safety of society, in Ukraine from the standpoint of sustainable development for the period up to 2030

The authors use international sources to develop the indicators and the methodology the use is explained in detail.

The main results of the paper are quite important and can be useful for the country in order to develop and evaluate the strategy of the Government

I have the following comment to the paper: The authors should explain in more detail the results and probably it should be very useful the comparative with previous papers.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We truly appreciate your time, understanding and high praise of our work. We are especially thankful for your valuable comments.

A Point-by-Point Response to Reviewer 2 is attached.

We have taken into account all your comments. In the article, all corrections are highlighted in blue.

Thank you very much for your support.

Best regards,

The authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In fact, the introduction is a summary, and does not explain the premises and motives for undertaking the research. A broader explanation is required here, taking into account the research trends from the literature, so as to indicate what is new in the discussed study. The selection of methods should be included in the section explaining the methodological approach. There, too, it is necessary to supplement. It is necessary to write why the method used was chosen.
It has not been explained in detail why the case of Ukraine is so important. The article does not have a good literature discussion. Introduction. The authors only "slipped" through the literature, the problem. There is no theory, no reference to it, and no real, solid discussion on what other authors have done on the subject. The authors should indicate whether other methods can be used for the study, or whether the indicated method is the only one.
There is no broad explanation, nor is there any indication whether the variables were tested in the literature on the subject. A justification is required for the selection of variables in the section "Defining the structure and boundaries of safe existence". Some of the discussion is very weak. It should relate to the literature and the results achieved. It is not shown how the research conducted modifies the theory or other research. A The authors should refer to the practical application of their research. You should also discuss what their research means for other researchers.
A very poor literature review.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your time and valuable comments.

A Point-by-Point Response to Reviewer 3 is attached.

Best regards,

The authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you for the invitation to review this interesting paper. 

The paper is interesting and well written using academic standards. 

The Authors present all the necesarry elements in the paper structure. The results are discussed well. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We truly appreciate your time, understanding and high praise of our work. 

Thank you very much for your support.

Best regards,

The authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, I really appreciate your methodology and recognize the big efforts which is invested in its development. What I didn’t appreciate is that you use methodology, and even insert certain empirical results, which have been previously published, without explicitly emphasizing this in the paper and without proper citations. Apart from wrong impression that methodology is originally designed for this particular research, (which would be a great value added for the paper if so), my personal view is that such thing is a serious violation of plagiarism code. Regarding the second aspect of my previous comments, I have a doubt that your methodology is reasonable to apply to non-economic set of variables that constitute integral index, not because of technical but substantial reasons. Following the above mentioned, I took neutral position in this review round and abstain from qualifying merits of your paper. My only suggestion is to make proper citations of your previous work and to refer at least one paper from WoS indexed journals, wherein methodology and scope of the research is arguably comparable to your own, to support soundness of your approach.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank you again for your time, interest in our article, in-depth analysis of all the nuances of the study, and especially for your fair comments and valuable recommendations. We can estimate approximately how much time you spent working with our article. Thank you so much for this! After all the corrections made, the article really improved a lot in its quality.

Special thanks to you for your support!

As a follow-up of our discussion regarding the use of the core of our methodology, we invite you to cooperation. Perhaps together we can work out in detail a methodology for a non-economic set of variables. To date, the methodology applied has been successfully used for identifying and strategizing in energy and national security, in industry, at the regional level, types of economic activities (railway transport, air transport, etc.), as well as at the level of large industrial enterprises.

We have checked and placed references to our papers. All corrections in the text are highlighted in blue.

We added references to similar articles in WoS in the previous round of discussion. If you can advise to cite any specific article, then we will be very grateful to you.

Thank you again for your interest and help in the process of improving our article!

With wishes of good health and scientific inspiration,

The authors

Reviewer 3 Report

I am not completely satisfied with the improvement of the article.  Conclusions should be better elaborated.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your time and very valuable comments and recommendations. After we took into account all the recommendations of the reviewers, the article really improved significantly in quality.

We have added two additional conclusions. The text added is highlighted in blue in the text.

Thanks again for your interest and help in the process of improving our article!

With wishes of good health and scientific inspiration,

The authors

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. The very sociopolitical characteristics of Eastern European countries raise severe doubts about the possibility of extending academic works on brands and nostalgia. It means assuming a high local character to the paper.
2. The entire literature review has significant flaws:
3. Excessive citations, with authors from years past.
4. Limitation of appointments after the 2010s.
5. Paragraphs that are completely unnecessary because they have no direct relationship with the subject.
6. The heading dedicated to the "Brand equity concept" does not contribute any interest.
7. The heading "Nostalgia in Brand Management" does not contain academic information on the models and empirical studies carried out on the issue.
8. The hypotheses appear without providing the academic basis of each of them.
9. The work does not explain the choice of specific brands correctly.
10. The study approach using demographic variables (gender, age ...) is excessively traditional, especially for the more developed markets.
11. If the constructs are constructs, it does not appear how the authors have created it. If the constructs are variable, there is no literature support on their choice.
12. The paper's total reading leaves the feeling of confusion between the nostalgic value and the loyalty to the brand.
13. There is a lack of data on the methodological design (sample design, questionnaire design), and what little there is leaves many doubts: how was the online survey developed? Where were the email addresses obtained from? How did the online system work in each of the population strata?

Reviewer 2 Report

I appreciate the significance and novelty of the research subject. Nevertheless, I found that the paper, in particular “Materials and Methods” section, is  poorly written in regard to standards of clarity and precision required in high quality scientific articles. This makes paper confusing, and it is extremely hard to follow the storyline and properly understand results of the research.

I refer to the couple of crucial points in text that are important to properly understand methodology, but I found them to be very confusingly depicted:

1. Authors claim (lines 100-104) “For the first time, the paper substantiates the definition of the vector of thresholds (boundaries of safe existence) for indicators of social safety of society using the general macroeconomic equilibrium model...”. Again (lines 131-133), it is claimed “For some indices, such as the shadow economy indicators, the dynamics and thresholds were determined using the 'social justice' method as a component of the general macroeconomic equilibrium model”. In the rest of the text there is no mentioning of the macroeconomic model, so it remains unclear what is its role in the methodology which is obviously grounded in Mathematics rather than in Economics.

2. Authors claim (lines 128-129) “The definition of the threshold vector is similar to the construction of a hypothetical country with the highest level of social safety of society across all indicators”. In Economics, this definition corresponds to the concept of Efficient Frontier, rather than concept of threshold as a sort of turning point.

3. Authors claim (lines 130-131) “The relevant data were selected mostly for the period of 2015-2016, however, sometimes the research used the Eurostat 2015–2020 forecast data.” Further on, they claimed (lines 146-147) “In the first stage, the scholars formed the indicators’ dynamics...”. The time scope of the data makes impossible any reasonable empirical modeling of indicators’ dynamics, so it remains unclear how those dynamics are modeled.

4. The major part of analysis revolves around constructed probability density functions. Since there are no time variations in data, I guess that PDF functions are calibrated using cross-sectional variations. It further implies that values of indicators are randomly distributed across countries. However, cross-sectional dimension of the sample is quite small to make reliable inference on probability distributions.

5. In the list of indicators (page 5), a symbol (S) or (D) is attached to each indicator on the list. It’s not clear whether these symbols refers to the modified methods of rationing (line 157), and if so why they differ across indicators.

6. The references in “Materials and Methods” section, which should provide deeper insight into methodology applied, are mostly auto-citations. Despite searching efforts through databases and Google, I was not able to find the key methodological reference no. [52].

Since I found depiction of methodology quite confusing to properly understand it, I was not able to form an opinion on the validity and quality of empirical results. In that manner, I would suggest a major revision of the “Materials and Methods” section, i.e. to rewrite this section in more intuitive manner that will be understandable at least to those readers who have solid mathematical and statistical background.

Beside this major issues, there are also some minor issues related to writing and presentation of the paper. For example, authors mostly refer to themselves in first-person, but in some lines they refer to themselves in the third-person (line 125: the “researchers” selected, line 146: the “scholars” formed, etc). Another example, Table 1 is placed in Result section, though it clearly belongs to Materials and Methods section since it does not provide any results. These and similar lapses should be utterly eliminated from the text.