A well-being index based on the weighted product method

Abstract

It has long been accepted that the GDP per capita cannot alone explain the well-being in a geographical area. Several have been the attempts to construct alternative, non-monetary, indices of well-being by aggregating a variety of individual indicators that represent different dimensions of well-being. The most famous, in Italy, are the Index of Regional Quality of Development and the “Il Sole 24 Ore” Quality of Life Index. An issue often not solved, from a methodological point of view, concerns the comparability of the data over time. In this work, we propose a ‘static’ and a ‘dynamic’ well-being measure based on the application of the Jevons index to the socio-economic indicators. The obtained indices are closely related and allow synthetic spatial and temporal comparisons of the level of well-being.