**4. Conclusions**

We measured the importance of 11 SD criteria as perceived by the general public in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. The 11 SD criteria were accessibility, capability, convenience, efficiency, environmental capacity, diversity and choice, inclusiveness, resilience and stability, security, self-sufficiency, and social justice. We used an indirect stated preference approach and employed 58 questions in 6 domains.

The main findings and the answers to the three research questions are as follows:


goal based on the SD criteria. Perception of the importance of the domains may be more influential than that of the criteria;

• The order (rank) of importance of the 11 SD criteria differed by country to a certain extent, which may be related to the economic development of the countries. For example, environmental capacity was ranked lower, and was ranked inclusiveness higher in the countries with a higher per capita GDP (research question 1a).

The main academic contributions of this study perceived by the authors are the development of the method for measuring the importance of SD criteria and the results of attempting the measurement. As many studies at their initial stages have, this study has some limitations. First, this study focused on six domains, but there are others. Second, there were only four target countries. Expanding the scope and number of countries remains as a future research task. The same survey applying to a country at a different time also remains as a future task. A third limitation is that we did not identify what the explanatory variables of the predictors of the importance of SD criteria of general public are. To do so, in-depth analyses of the results are needed. The fourth limitation is the number of SD criteria. Establishing a more complete set of SD criteria and the questions that should be used to elucidate relevant responses also remains as a future research task. Finally, although we devised and employed an indirect stated preference approach in this study, the development of different approaches to measure the importance of SD criteria and to compare the results among the different methodologies should allow us to produce more reliable results in the future.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, T.T., R.T. and Y.K.; methodology, formal analysis, investigation, visualization, supervision, writing—original draft preparation, T.T.; writing—review and editing, R.T. and Y.K.; funding acquisition, Y.K. and T.T. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was conducted based on the research funded by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (S-11) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency, Japan.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
