Theoretical and quantitative issues on assessing well-being and quality of life

This PhD dissertation contains the results of a broad research carried out at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Genoa. Those contributions are related to the analysis of Well-being and Quality of Life and the indexes created to measure them, facing different issues and answering to diverse questions. Usually, especially until a decade ago, per-capita income has been adopted as a unique measure to quantify well-being, although it can represents it only partially. As per-capita income measures the total value of final goods and services produced within the borders of a country in a year, it focuses only on the economic dimension of well-being. It ignores other determinants of well-being, so the evaluation of the multidimensional nature of well-being is limited to the monetary dimension. The measurement of income, despite its incompleteness, still remains an indicator able to show the historical evolution of well-being between people and countries history. Actually, there are many forms of well-being, and before discussing the concrete policies to increase them, it is necessary to fully understand the many nuances of the concept. In order to do so, it is necessary to refer to both economic and social aspects, evaluating the interconnections between them. Only such an analysis allows to highlight an increasingly complex and detailed phenomenon. Thus, to go beyond the mere income-related aspect of well-being, it is crucial to consider well-being as a multidimensional phenomenon involving all aspects of people’s lives. This is the reason why, after the financial crisis, which hit industrialized economies in the final part of the 2000s, “Quality of Life’’ and ‘‘Well-being’’, became very popular words and received the attention of policy makers and researchers. The first term is mainly used when one speaks at the level of individuals, whilst the second is more frequent when one speaks about communities, localities, and societies. Similarly, ‘‘Well-being’’ refers rather to actual experience, and ‘‘Quality of Life’’ to context and environments. However, in both cases, the terms are used with a broad range of meanings, and the ranges frequently overlap. However, this multidimensionality makes the assessment of Well-being and Quality of Life even more complex, because most of its dimensions are hard to identify and quantify and depend on subjective assessments. The aim of this work is to investigate and to find possible theoretical backgrounds and methods able to give an extensive, but at the same time organised, description of those phenomena, as well as a precise assessment. The first part (Chapter 1) of the work presents the topic under scrutiny, summarizing the main concepts and findings about multidimensional Well-being and its quantification. It goes through different frameworks, as well as the examination of a number of international well-being indicators familiar to the public audience. The subsequent three chapters instead, focus on measurement issues. Chapter 2 shows the construction of a composite multidimensional Well-being index for the European Union. It represents a comprehensive quantitative attempt to deal with the multidimensionality of the phenomenon. Chapter 3 is a step further, since, focusing on the European Union again, it tries to assess if the use of two different kind of aggregation methodologies, compensatory and non-compensatory, could create difficulties in quantify well-being. The final chapter, Chapter 4, deal with other two fundamental issues in the multidimensional well-being evaluation. Indeed, analysing data about Italian cities, the aim is to deal with the attribution of specific weights to dimensions and with intertemporal comparison.