Measuring the performance of Italian regions: on social and economic dimensions

This paper presents a new analytical framework for assessing spatial disparities among regions. On the premise that the analysis of a region’s performance cannot be limited solely to either economic or social aspects, the paper attempts to combine the material (i.e. economic) and immaterial (i.e. social) aspects of welfare and well-being in an integrated logical scheme. In this scheme the economic aspects of living standards are represented by various categories of consumption expenditure, whilst the social aspects are represented by appropriate indicators of health, education, labour market conditions, etc. The framework proposed is also appealing for convergence analyses over time. From a time perspective, introducing this joint socio-economic concept into the analysis of differences among countries allows one to disentangle the notion of convergence into its economic and social dimensions. An empirical analysis is conducted on the Italian regions for the period from 1980 to 2005. The empirical results obtained by Principal Component Analysis show that, on average, a high level of economic welfare may contrast with a high level of social well-being.