Poverty is a multidimensional, fuzzy and complex phenomenon that cannot be faithfully represented by mono-dimensional monetary indicators. In the last years, much research has been devoted to tackle poverty fuzziness, while less attention has been paid to poverty complexity. In this paper, we...

Partial Order Theory has been recently more and more employed in applied science to overcome the intrinsic disadvantage hidden in linear ranking, if a multiple indicator system is available. Despite its numerous positive features, there are many practical cases where the interpretation of the...

The jointly use of two latent factors methods is proposed to assess a measurement instrument for underlying phenomena. In particular the decay status of valuable Italian buildings is quantified on the basis of a wide set of observed categorical variables. At the purpose, Rasch analysis is used...

A procedure for the construction of an indicator in the presence of structured missing data is proposed. In particular, we face the problem of creating a ‘measure’ of the damage degree of valuable historical-architectonical buildings on the basis of the observation of several ordinal...

We propose the setting-up of an indicator for classifying European countries with relation to consumers' satisfaction for services of general interest. Services considered are fixed telephone service, electricity supply, railways and postal service. The reference data set is the 2002 Standard...

We propose a procedure to assess a measure for a latent phenomenon, starting from the observation of a wide set of ordinal variables affected by structured missing data. The proposal is based on Nonlinear PCA technique to be jointly used with an ad hoc imputation method for the treatment of...

Two different methodologies, Nonlinear PCA and Partial Credit version of Rasch model, are applied to real data to obtain a quantitative measure of a latent factor. Specifically the goal is to identify the level of damage of a set of particurarly valuable public buildings. Several ordinal...

The paper describes an empirical analysis to understand the main drivers of economic growth in the European Union (EU) regions in the past decade. The analysis maintains the traditional factors of growth used in the literature on regional growth - stage of development, population agglomeration,...