Abstract
Efforts recently attempted to integrate various aspects of economic progress, environmental sustainability and social welfare into an aggregate measure of well-being share one major weakness concerning the identification of key aspects of well-being and of weights to aggregate these dimensions, they all suffer from lack of legitimacy. In this paper we present an innovative and well tested approach that attempts to overcome such limitation granting legitimacy through a broad consultation of civil society organisations. After a brief review of the state of the art, we present the methodology followed to build the QUARS (Index of Regional Quality of Development) and we point out strengths and weaknesses of our approach. We summarize the results according to the selected variables for Italian regions, we present the outcomes of our dissemination work and assess the robustness of the composite indicator.
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Notes
“Legitimacy is a shared expectation among actors in an arrangement of asymmetric power, such that the actions of those who rule are accepted voluntarily by those who are ruled because the latter are convinced that the actions of the former conform to pre-established norms” (Schmitter 2001).
Basically, one can consider the two separate notions: a high level of current well-being can be achieved at the price of lower sustainability; while conversely higher sustainability today may imply lower current well-being. This consideration underscores the importance of separate measures for these two concepts (Stiglitz et al. 2008).
The indicator QUARS was firstly developed by Alessandro Messina and Martino Mazzonis (Sbilanciamoci! 2005), with the scientific support of Mario Pianta, Paolo Palazzi and Giulio Marcon. The current formulation of the index has been developed in 2006 by the authors.
In a sample of n observations it is possible for a limited number to be so far separated in value from the remainder that they give rise to the question whether they are not from a different population, or that the sampling technique is a fault. Such values are called outliers (Marriott 1990).
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Acknowledgments
We acknowledge Mario Pianta, Giulio Marcon, Alessandro Messina, Maurizio Franzini, Paolo Palazzi. We have also benefited from useful discussion with Anna Villa, Angelo Marano, Alessandro Santoro, Andrea Calori, Alberto Tarozzi, Grazia Naletto, Gianfranco Bologna, Stefano Inglese. Financial support has been provided by Lunaria.
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Segre, E., Rondinella, T. & Mascherini, M. Well-Being in Italian Regions. Measures, Civil Society Consultation and Evidence. Soc Indic Res 102, 47–69 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9722-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9722-4