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It is the Total that Does [Not] Make the Sum: Nature, Economy and Society in the Equitable and Sustainable Well-Being of the Italian Provinces

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Abstract

Over the last years there has been an increasing interest in measuring well-being at local level. This is mainly due to the fact that socio-economic indicators at country level do not provide a complete picture of the living conditions in a territory. Moreover, the temporal dimension is also a fundamental aspect that allows analysing the trends of local well-being over time. The aim of this paper is to provide a more in-depth analysis of territorial disparities, inequalities and divergences across the Italian territories. In particular, this paper is one of the first attempts to analyse the overtime trend of the Italian well-being at provincial level (NUTS3) using a subset of indicators recently provided by ISTAT to measure the Equitable and Sustainable Well-being (BES) at local level. We apply a Bayesian latent variable model to construct three composite indicators related to the three main pillars of well-being, namely economic, social, and environmental. These composite indicators have been estimated for all the years between 2004 and 2016 for each Italian province. Results suggest that in the period of analysis the economic well-being has worsened in almost all provinces, with weak signs of recovery starting from 2014. On the contrary, social well-being improved in almost all provinces, with some exceptions in the South. The environmental well-being has increased over time as well, more in the Northern and Central provinces than in the South.

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Fig. 1

Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data. (Color figure online)

Fig. 2

Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data

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Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data

Fig. 4

Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data. (Color figure online)

Fig. 5

Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data

Fig. 6

Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data

Fig. 7

Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data. (Color figure online)

Fig. 8

Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data. (Color figure online)

Fig. 9

Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data. (Color figure online)

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Notes

  1. The ISTAT project “Equitable and Sustainable Well-being Measures at local level” (“Il BES dei territori”) can be considered an update of the previous “Provinces’ BES” project, firstly promoted by CUSPI (Coordination of Statistical Offices of the Italian Provinces) and realized under the ISTAT’s methodological and technical coordination.

  2. A first attempt to implement a Bayesian LVM to ISTAT’s data on “BES at local level” has been proposed by Ciommi et al. (2017b). However, in that paper, authors focused on a very limited number of elementary indicators.

  3. JAGS is a program for analysis of Bayesian hierarchical models using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. See Plummer (2003) for more details. We are grateful to A. Rijpma who kindly provided us with the code.

  4. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/regions/data/database.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Università degli Studi dell’Insubria, Via Monte Generoso, 71, 21100, Varese, VA, Italy

    Chiara Gigliarano

  2. Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy

    Mariateresa Ciommi, Francesco M. Chelli & Mauro Gallegati

Authors
  1. Mariateresa Ciommi
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  2. Chiara Gigliarano
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  3. Francesco M. Chelli
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  4. Mauro Gallegati
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Correspondence to Chiara Gigliarano.

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Appendices

Appendix A1

See Table 6.

Table 6 Descriptive statistics of the 27 elementary indicators involved in our analysis
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Appendix A2

See Figs. 10, 11 and 12.

Fig. 10
figure 10

Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data

Correlation between per capita GDP and each indicator of the economic well-being, over the years 2004–2016.

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Fig. 11
figure 11

Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data

Correlation between per capita GDP and each indicator of the social well-being, over the years 2004–2016.

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Fig. 12
figure 12

Source: Our elaboration on “BES at local level” data

Correlation between per capita GDP and each indicator of the environmental well-being, over the years 2004–2016.

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Appendix A3

See Tables 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.

Table 7 Economic well-being: composite indicator’s median, 5th and 95th percentiles for the Italian provinces in 2004
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Table 8 Economic well-being: composite indicator’s median, 5th and 95th percentiles for the Italian provinces in 2016
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Table 9 Social well-being: composite indicator’s median, 5th and 95th percentiles for the Italian provinces in 2004
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Table 10 Social well-being: composite indicator’s median, 5th and 95th percentiles for the Italian provinces in 2016
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Table 11 Environmental well-being: composite indicator’s median, 5th and 95th percentiles for the Italian provinces in 2004
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Table 12 Environmental well-being: composite indicator’s median, 5th and 95th percentiles for the Italian provinces in 2016
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Ciommi, M., Gigliarano, C., Chelli, F.M. et al. It is the Total that Does [Not] Make the Sum: Nature, Economy and Society in the Equitable and Sustainable Well-Being of the Italian Provinces. Soc Indic Res 161, 491–522 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02331-w

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