| Abstract: |
This paper has a twofold aim: the former is to focus on the concept of
well-being/quality of life and its relationships with local sustainable
development and the latter is to apply the capability approach at regional
level. More specifically, one wants to analyse if sustainable development at a
local level serves to better understand both the formation of well-being
and/or quality of life. The instrument which will allow us to verify the
operational value of the capability approach is the building of a
multidimensional synthetic index of sustainability. This index will consists
of aggregating a set of variables of different nature – from the
socio-economic to the environmental ones. It may be considered an alternative
to the conventional indices, which are normally founded on GDP, and will be
applied to the Italian regions. After having standardised each variable so to
make them homogeneous, the methodology proposed, which will allow us to gather
and compare the Italian regions according to the higher or lower level of
quality of life, is the Wroclaw’s Economic School taxonomic method. The
results obtained may represent an information tool for targeting and zoning
sustainable development measures which aim at improving well-being/quality of
life at a local level. |