Ricerc@Sapienza

GDP was never designed to be a comprehensive measure of prosperity and well-being. Finding alternative indicators of progress, wealth and well-being, more inclusive of environmental and social aspects, have become a mainstream issue in the public and scientific debate.
The Equitable and Sustainable Well-being (BES) project, led by Istat, is a crucial source of information for researchers and policy makers in Italy, and many studies describing several aspects of well-being in Italy have been published based on these data.
The main aim of the project is to develop statistical procedures useful to analyse the evolution of well-being over time in Italy, to find patterns or similarities in the geographical areas and to highlight their main characteristics across space and time, a problem that has not been fully investigated so far.
The research aims at developing statistical procedures for the description and the interpretation of well being with the following main objectives:

1)  Inspecting the cross-sectional structure of the set of indicators at each time occasion
2) Highlighting the temporal and spatio-temporal structure of the BES data,  to highlight the evolution over time of the whole set of well-being indicators, and  finding groups of units that exhibit similar patterns across time;  characterizing the spatial profile of well-being in the multivariate space defined by the set of indicators
3) Describing the longitudinal and spatial variation of well-being in Italy based on the BES data made available by Istat