Measuring the sustainability performances of the Italian regions

The aim of this paper is twofold, methodological and empirical. From the methodological point of view it aims at contributing to the debate about composite indicators. From the empirical one it assesses the relative sustainability of the Italian regions. Instead of building a single composite indicator (score) for each region, we calculate many composite indices by combining different weighting systems and rules of normalization and aggregation. In this way, we get a distribution function of the ranks (and a plausible rank range) for each country. Such an approach represents a good compromise between the need of synthesising the information provided by many variables and the need to avoid the loss of relevant information that occurs when several indicators are aggregated into a single composite index.