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Clustering of the Italian Regions Based on Their Equitable and Sustainable Well-Being Indicators: A Three-Way Approach

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Abstract

The aim of this study is to provide an analysis of the Italian regions according to their equitable and sustainable well-being indicators pertaining to several economic, social and environmental domains with reference to the year 2017, in order to identify groups of homogeneous regions taking into account the heterogeneity of the domains. In particular, the regions are grouped into root clusters, which are consistent across domains, and specific clusters, which vary with domains. The partitions are obtained using the ROOT CLUStering (ROOTCLUS) model for three-way proximity data. The results show that in the well-known opposition between northern and southern Italian territories, some regions located in the Central and Southern Italy have a diversified behaviour with respect to some domains.

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Notes

  1. It is worth pointing out that no composite indicators are officially produced at the provincial level and some basic indicators are substituted by proxies of the corresponding regional ones.

  2. According to data availability, for the indicators “Share of employed persons not in regular occupation”, “Beds in residential health care facilities” and “Children who benefited of early childhood services”, the 2016 datum is replicated; for “ Water losses in urban supply system” that of 2015.

  3. As far as the Environment domain is concerned, in this study, it differs from Istat only for the indicator “Quality of urban air” that has been excluded.

  4. The algorithm has been implemented by Bocci and Vicari (2019) in MATLAB R2017b.

  5. Note that \(w_2\) and \(w_3\) are missing here because the root clusters Root 2 and Root 3 are singletons and the diagonal entries of the similarity matrices are not fitted in this application.

  6. Also, bars colour is associated with clustering membership identified by the root partition. The dark blue color is used to distinguish the influential units belonging to the Cluster 3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Comunicazione e Ricerca Sociale, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Laura Bocci

  2. Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali ed Economiche, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Pierpaolo D’Urso & Vincenzina Vitale

Authors
  1. Laura Bocci
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  2. Pierpaolo D’Urso
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  3. Vincenzina Vitale
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Correspondence to Laura Bocci.

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Bocci, L., D’Urso, P. & Vitale, V. Clustering of the Italian Regions Based on Their Equitable and Sustainable Well-Being Indicators: A Three-Way Approach. Soc Indic Res 155, 995–1043 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02582-7

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