Measuring Well-Being In A Multidimensional Perspective: A Multivariate Statistical Application To Italian Regions

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.