Well-Being Indicators and Convergence Across Italian Regions

This article studies convergence across Italian regions by means of twocomposite indicators of socio-economic progress reflecting the multidimensionalnature of human well-being. The first composite indicator includes, other thanhousehold disposable income in Italy, two sub-indicators regarding health and education;the second composite indicator considers, in addition to those considered bythe former, three further sub-indicators relating to the quality of the socio-institutionalcontext, age and gender disparities in the labor market and regional competitiveness.The data base of the 17 variables or indexes used to construct the six abovementionedsub-indicators cover the period from 1998 to 2008. We assess the existence of both σand γ- convergence; the latter computed by means of Kendall′s index. Consistentwith the findings in other European countries that also use composite economic andquality of life indicators we find evidence of regional σ-convergence in well-being,but do not observe significant processes of intra-distributional mobility. In otherwords, while dispersion across Italian regions in terms of well-being levels declinedin the period, the regional ranking remained substantially unchanged.