Measuring Equitable and Sustainable Well-Being in Italy

Abstract

In recent years, a new movement aiming at measuring well-being is emerging following initiatives carried out by national and local political authorities, the research on the measurement of quality of life and happiness, and the initiatives undertaken by the OECD on measuring and fostering societal progress. In this context, measuring national well-being and societal progress in Italy is one of the challenges that the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) is called to face. Istat’s attention toward this issue has taken the form of a number of activities aimed at strengthening the ability of official statistics to measure specific dimensions of well-being. Such initiatives include objective and subjective measures of individual well-being, the strengthening of environmental measures and accounts, and the adaptation of macroeconomic aggregates to provide distributional information and to overcome GDP limitations in general. In 2011, Istat together with the National Council for Economics and Labor (CNEL) started a national consultation to identify a shared set of indicators of the progress of the Italian society, thus having to provide a sufficient and robust statistical production as well as enhancing a democratic process able to grant legitimacy to the selected key indicators.