Rural Areas and Well-Being in EU Countries + UK: A Taxonomy and a Cluster Analysis

Abstract

The issue of rural and marginal areas has regained centrality in recent times, also due to the fact that rural areas actively participate in the EU’s green and digital transition. The starting point of the paper is the concept of fair and sustainable well-being, which has been interpreted differently in relation to the diversity of territories and particularly in relation to the differences between urban and rural areas. The objective of this work is the construction of a synthetic index of the welfare of European countries through the Wroclaw taxonomic method and through the use of logit models for the identification of best practices of local realities and the interpretation in a more immediate way of the fair and sustainable welfare of each European country at a rural level.