The paper presents a composite indicator of well-being for Italian agriculture.Well-being is defined as the health condition of the agricultural sector from the point of view of farmers. The indicator is based on four dimensions: social, environmental, institutional and economic, allowing...

We argue against the use of composite indices, such as the Human Development Index (HDI), in economic history. We show that the HDI can be interpreted as a formal representation of the analyst’s ethical system. We support our claim by introducing a new class of paternalistic social welfare...

We derive the asymptotic sampling distribution of various estimators frequently used to order distributions in terms of poverty, welfare and inequality. This includes estimators of most of the poverty indices currently in use, as well as estimators of the curves used to infer stochastic...