The papers in this special issue of Quality & Quantity are mostly based on presentations from the international conference of the Italian Statistical Society (SIS): Statistics and Demography: the legacy of Corrado Gini, that was held in Treviso (Italy), on September 9–11, 2015, to remember the founder of the Italian school of statistics 50 years after his death.

Corrado Gini was born in 1884, in Motta di Livenza, few kilometres far from Treviso. He entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Bologna, where in addition to law he studied mathematics, economics, and biology. His subsequent scientific work followed two directions: towards the social sciences and towards statistics. His interests ranged well beyond the formal aspects of statistic, to the laws that govern biological and social phenomena. In 1910 he acceded to the Chair of Statistics in the University of Cagliari and then at Padua in 1913. He founded the statistical journal Metron in 1920 that he directed until his death in 1965. He became professor at the University of Rome in 1925, where he founded a lecture course on sociology, which he maintained until his retirement. He also set up the School of Statistics, in 1928, and, in 1936, the Faculty of Statistical, Demographic and Actuarial Sciences. In 1929 Gini founded the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems that, two years later, organised the first Population Congress in Rome. In 1926 he was appointed President of the Central Institute of Statistics in Rome (ISTAT). He resigned in 1932 to protest against interferences in his work by the fascist state. He was elected SIS president from 1941 to 1965.

It is not easy to provide an analytical reconstruction of Gini’s scientific trajectory, because he was the protagonist of an impressive season of methodological innovations, and he was responsible for a significant development in the organization of teaching, research and dissemination of statistic.

For many statisticians Gini brings to the mind foremost the concentration index, but his heritage goes besides devising indexes and formulas. He was closely involved in some of Italy’s political upheavals during the first half of the twentieth century.

The focus of this special issue is on the advances of statistical methods and applications that are related in some ways to the Gini’s work. A major goal of the volume is to bring together articles which are written by statisticians from different research fields and which will hopefully present different approaches and experiences. Some articles give new results related to the Gini indexes, studying distribution properties e new approaches to build composite indicators. The applications are mainly in the educational setting, customer satisfaction and efficiency of public services analysis.

All articles in this volume were treated to the same reviewing and publication standards as the other articles in Quality & Quantity. Our thanks to the authors, reviewers, and consulting editors for quickly moving the papers through the review process.