Spatial information comprehensive well-being composite indicators: an illustration on Italian Varese province

Abstract

This analysis bears upon the European “Beyond GDP initiative”, which promotes multi dimensional approaches going beyond the traditional and uni-dimensional GDP macroeconomic indicator to monitor the living condition and the well-being of a territory. We assess the well-being within the Varese province by applying factor analysis with integration of spatial information in a Bayesian framework. To summarize the large number of indicators within the 10 domains that constitutes “A misura di comune” dataset we construct four composite indicators for each Varese municipality. The first is comprehensive of all the “A misura di comune” indicators but not the one related to the Population and Family domain. The last three composite indicators assess the municipalities in term of their social, economic and environmental well-being. We highlight differentials across Northern and Southern municipalities in all the well-being domains, with the former performing usually better. We also identify in the economic domain the leading well-being domain, that drives the overall wealth to higher values.