【摘要】Interest in measuring well-being; as opposed to the more traditional economic indicators of growth; has increased significantly over recent years. This paper aims to contribute to the empirical literature on well-being indicators and dispersion across regions in terms of both quality of life and economic progress. Italian regions are used as case studies and 10 different multidimensional determinants of well-being are considered: culture and free time; education; employment; environment; availability of essential public services; health; material living conditions; personal security; research and innovation; and the strength of social relations. We calculated; by applying principal component analysis; synthetic indicators for each well-being determinant and for each region so as to generate-again; by means of the same methodology-an index of overall well-being. The study was conducted for every year over the period 2004-2010. Results clearly show that differences in well-being between regions are not necessarily in line with those based on per capita GDP; suggesting a need to give more attention to quality-of-life features of economic progress in public policy goals and design. Furthermore; the paper looked at dispersion across regions and regional rank mobility over the same period. Italian regions have tended to become more similar in terms of well-being over time; but no evidence of significant intra-distributional mobility emerges.

【文献来源】Ferrara A;Nisticò R.Annals of regional Science.2015（2）