LAUSR

This paper aims to incorporate welfare into sustainable development by arguing that sustainability should be scaled on rationality and safety premises. The paper describes the manner in which sustainable development principles have been distorted over time and the need for an enrichment of the concept with original ideas based on safety and rationality in development that would lead to an actual consideration of individual welfare. To this end, safety and rationality components are described, as they are regarded as requirements of sustainable development, and the rationality component is further analyzed. The methodology allows the building of an index of rationality for the 2007–2013 research interval, which attempts to capture the complexity of the rationality dimension of sustainability. The index of rationality is applied to specific circumstances from different countries and is used on a cross‐country analysis to determine the progress of the member states of the European Union on the sustainability road. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment