Multidimensional Well-being and Regional Disparities in Europe

Jörg Döpke, Andreas Knabe, Cornelia Lang and Philip Maschke

No 13/2016, IWH Discussion Papers from Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH)

Abstract: Using data from the OECD Regional Well-Being Index - a set of quality-of-life indicators measured at the sub-national level, we construct a set of composite well-being indices. We analyse the extent to which the choice of five alternative aggregation methods affects the well-being ranking of regions. We find that regional inequality in these composite measures is lower than regional inequality in gross-domestic product (GDP) per capita. For most aggregation methods, the rank correlation across regions appears to be quite high. It is also shown that using alternative indicators instead of GDP per capita would only have a small effect on the set of regions eligible for aid from EU Structural Funds. The exception appears to be an aggregation based on how individual dimensions of welfare relate to average life satisfaction across regions, which would substantially change both the ranking of regions and which regions would receive EU funds.

Keywords: well-being; regional economic policy; EU structural funds; composite index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 I31 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hap and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/130225/1/856223395.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Multidimensional Well‐being and Regional Disparities in Europe (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:iwhdps:iwh-13-16

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IWH Discussion Papers from Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().