Mariateresa Ciommi

Going regional: An index of sustainable economic welfare for Italy

Abstract The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) is a monetary measure of sustainability and economic welfare aimed at overcoming some of the limitations of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In particular it accounts for the value of externalities, for the distribution of income and for the natural resources depletion. Since its formulation in 1989 by Daly and Cobb, the ISEW has been calculated for a number of nations. More recently, there has been an increasing interest in assessing sustainable welfare also at sub-national levels. Following this trend, the aim of this paper is to provide an empirical application of the ISEW for Italy and for all its regions and macro-areas over the years 1999–2009. In particular, we compare the ranking of the Italian macro-areas and regions based on ISEW with the corresponding rankings based on GDP. This is the first empirical analysis in the literature that provides estimates and comparisons of the ISEW for all the Italian regions and macro-areas over a long period of time. Another important novelty of this paper concerns the introduction of a weighting scheme to adjust private consumptions based not only on inequality but also on poverty. Empirical results show substantial differences between the regional ranking based on ISEW and the traditional classification based on GDP, revealing, moreover, that the Italian regions are characterized by a high variability in terms of their sustainable and economic welfare.

Influence of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis dysregulation on the metabolic profile of patients affected by diabetes mellitus-associated late onset hypogonadism.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Functional hypercortisolism (FH) is generated by clinical states able to chronically activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis [e.g. diabetes mellitus (DM)]. No study has evaluated FH influence in worsening the metabolic profile of male patients affected by DM-associated hypogonadism. In this retrospective work, we assess the possible association between HPA axis-dysregulation and cardiovascular risk factors in men simultaneously affected by DM and late-onset hypogonadism (LOH). METHODS AND RESULTS Fourteen DM and LOH subjects affected by FH (Hypercort-DM-LOH) and fourteen DM and LOH subjects who were not suffering from FH (Normocort-DM-LOH) were retrospectively considered. Clinical, hormonal and metabolic parameters were retrieved. All metabolic parameters, except for systolic blood pressure, were significantly worse in Hypercort-DM-LOH than in Normocort-DM-LOH. After adjustment for body mass index, waist and total testosterone, Hypercort-DM-LOH subjects showed significantly worse metabolic parameters than Normocort-DM-LOH ones. In Normocort-DM-LOH, no significant correlation between general/hormonal parameters and metabolic variables was present. In Hypercort-DM-LOH, positive and significant correlations of cortisol area under the curve (AUC) after corticotropin releasing hormone with glycemia, triglycerides and blood pressure were evident; on the other hand, negative and significant correlation was present between cortisol AUC and high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. The associations of AUC cortisol with glycemia, HDL cholesterol and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) were further confirmed at quantile regression after adjustment for therapy. CONCLUSIONS FH may determine a worsening of the metabolic profile in DM-associated hypogonadism.

The decompositions of rank-dependent poverty measures using ordered weighted averaging operators

This paper is concerned with rank-dependent poverty measures and shows that an ordered weighted averaging, hereafter OWA, operator underlies in the definition of these indices. The dual decomposition of an OWA operator into the self-dual core and the anti-self-dual remainder allows us to propose a decomposition for all the rank-dependent poverty measures in terms of incidence, intensity and inequality. In fact, in the poverty field, it is well known that every poverty index should be sensitive to the incidence of poverty, the intensity of poverty and the inequality among the poor individuals. However, the inequality among the poor can be analyzed in terms of either incomes or gaps of the distribution of the poor. And, depending on the side we focus on, contradictory results can be obtained. Nevertheless, the properties inherited by the proposed decompositions from the OWA operators oblige the inequality components to measure equally the inequality of income and inequality of gap overcoming one of the main drawbacks in poverty and inequality measurement. Finally, we provide an empirical illustration showing the appeal of our decompositions for some European Countries in 2005 and 2011. All the rank-dependent poverty measures are written in terms of OWA operators.The decomposition of OWA operators implies the decomposition of poverty measures.The obtained inequality components are consistent.An empirical study for 25 European Countries shows the source of poverty change.

Diversity and social fractionalization: empirical findings

The chapter embraces the definition of diversity which refers to the composition of a society, namely to economic, cultural and physical differences among individuals and groups within a society, due to differences in race, language, ethnicity, nationality and gender, to mention a few. This chapter surveys the empirical literature on social fractionalization and diversity, focusing on two aspects. The first main section of the chapter is devoted to the choice of the variable used to identify groups and to the associated datasets. The second main section reviews studies that have investigated the impacts of social fractionalization and diversity on a number of socioeconomic variables, such as growth, development, quality of institutions, rise of conflict and wages.

The orness value for rank-dependent welfare functions and rank-dependent poverty measures

Abstract We propose two distribution-sensitivity criteria to classify the rank-dependent welfare functions. These criteria compare the reaction of the welfare function to lossy transfers and lossy equalization transfers among individuals. We see that these classifications in terms of their distribution-sensitivity to these transfers can be established focusing only on the weights assigned to each welfare function. We also propose a criterion to sort the rank-dependent welfare functions and the rank-dependent poverty measures in terms of a mathematical value called orness . We provide a classification in terms of the orness value for the welfare functions of the S-Gini family, the Bonferroni index and the De Vergottini index. Another classification is provided for the poverty measures of the Poverty Gap Ratio, the Sen indices, the Thon index and the Thon family of indices, the Kakwani family of indices and the S-Gini family of indices. Finally, we prove that the orness classification for welfare functions and the orness classification for poverty measures can be interpreted as a distribution-sensitive classification since they have a direct link with the classifications proposed above. Moreover, we see that for a subset of welfare functions and another subset of poverty measures, the orness classification and the distribution-sensitivity classification based on lossy transfers and lossy equalization transfers are equivalent.

Assessing the Equitable and Sustainable Well-Being of the Italian Provinces

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the measurement of well-being of individuals and societies. Influenced by the “beyond GDP” initiative, in 2012 the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and the National Council for Economics and Labour launched the Equitable and Sustainable Well-being (BES, from the Italian acronym of “Benessere Equo e Sostenibile”) project, a set of 134 indicators aimed at capturing the Italian well-being. Lately, the debate on how to measure the well-being moved from the national level to the local one. Following this new trend, ISTAT introduced a set of 88 indicators for the local well-being (at NUTS3 level), the so called “Provinces’ BES”. Based on this project, aim of the paper is to provide an exploratory analysis for detecting groups of Italian provinces that share similar well-being profiles. In particular, we first apply a factor analysis with the aim to reduce the high number of indicators and, grounded on these results, we then create groups of the Italian provinces, applying the cluster analysis, in order to find similarity among them. Finally, based on the result of the factor analysis, for each domain and for each Italian province, we construct a composite indicator that is a linear combination of the estimated factor scores, with weights based on the Gini index of concentration.

Ageing in a multicultural Europe: perspectives and challenges

Ageing is the key demographic trend in Europe. Migration is the second major phenomenon shaping European population structure, introducing a further dimension to the ageing challenge, namely, ageing populations with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of ageing migrants is surprisingly understudied.