Assessing the Equitable and Sustainable Well-Being of the Italian Provinces

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the measurement of well-being of individuals and societies. Influenced by the “beyond GDP” initiative, in 2012 the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and the National Council for Economics and Labour launched the Equitable and Sustainable Well-being (BES, from the Italian acronym of “Benessere Equo e Sostenibile”) project, a set of 134 indicators aimed at capturing the Italian well-being. Lately, the debate on how to measure the well-being moved from the national level to the local one. Following this new trend, ISTAT introduced a set of 88 indicators for the local well-being (at NUTS3 level), the so called “Provinces’ BES”. Based on this project, aim of the paper is to provide an exploratory analysis for detecting groups of Italian provinces that share similar well-being profiles. In particular, we first apply a factor analysis with the aim to reduce the high number of indicators and, grounded on these results, we then create groups of the Italian provinces, applying the cluster analysis, in order to find similarity among them. Finally, based on the result of the factor analysis, for each domain and for each Italian province, we construct a composite indicator that is a linear combination of the estimated factor scores, with weights based on the Gini index of concentration.