MEASURING WELL-BEING IN A MULTIDIMENSIONAL PERSPECTIVE: A MULTIVARIATE STATISTICAL APPLICATION TO ITALIAN REGIONS

Antonella Ferrara and Rosanna Nisticò ()
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Rosanna Nisticò: Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza, Università della Calabria

No 201406, Working Papers from Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania" - DESF

Abstract: The interest for the measurement of well-being has been increasing among scholars and major international institutions. This paper proposes a synthetic index for ten dimensions of well-being combining a set of 57 variables at the Italian regional level and an overall indicator of well-being by implementing a principal component analysis. We also investigate sigma-convergence and gamma-convergence across Italian regions over the period 2004-2010. We find that the regional well-being divide in Italy is, at least, as relevant as the economic divide, suggesting the importance of paying much more attention in public policies and academic debates to the quality-of-life features of the Italian scene. The analysis in terms of sigma-convergence shows that the Italian regions tend to become more similar over time, both in terms of per-capita GDP and well-being, even if a gradual slowing-down of this process can be observed in recent years. Conversely, there is no evidence of intra-distributional mobility of the Italian regions over the entire distribution (gamma-convergence) for either per-capita GDP or the well-being index.

Keywords: well-being indicators; s-convergence; ?-convergence; principal component analysis; Italy; regions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I31 O18 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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http://www.ecostat.unical.it/RePEc/WorkingPapers/WP06_2014.pdf First version, 2014-06 (application/pdf)

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