Assessing
quality of regional development from a non-compensatory point of view:
measure and graphical representations
It has long been accepted
that material well-being, as measured by GDP per capita, cannot alone
explain the development in a geographical area. Several have been the
attempts to construct alternative, non-monetary measures of social and
economic well-being by combining in a single index a variety of different
dimensions that are thought to represent development.
Since 2003, the Italian campaign “Sbilanciamoci!” has published
a yearly report on the quality of regional development (QUARS) where
the 20 regions making up Italy are ranked on the basis of 41 individual
indicators divided into 7 dimensions: environment, economy and labour,
rights and citizenship, health, cultural and educational level, equal
opportunities, political and social participation. After the normalization
of the variables, the mean values of 7 macro-indicators are calculated
and the composite index corresponds to the simple average of these values.
The aim of this work is to compare different methodological approaches
for summarizing data. It is known that the arithmetic mean assumes a
full substitutability among the components of the index: a deficit in
one dimension may be compensated by a surplus in another. However, a
complete compensability among the principal dimensions of development
is not desirable. Therefore, a non-compensatory approach is presented
and a graphical method for visualizing the results is shown.
The differences between the two approaches provide some reflections
about the basic assumptions and the choice of the more appropriate aggregation
method.