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Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: The Well-Being of the Italians (1861–2011)

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Abstract

As a part of the international debate on Beyond the GDP, this paper describes the temporal trend of the multidimensional well-being of the Italians from 1861 to 2011. Building on the CNEL and ISTAT’s Equitable and Sustainable Well-being (Benessere Equo e Sostenibile, BES) project, the paper selects 41 indicators that are grouped into eight dimensions characterizing the most important aspects of everyday life: health, education, work, economic well-being, political participation, security, environment and research and development. In order to synthesize the information provided by this large set of indicators, a composite index for each dimension is tracked over the time span of 150 years. The main contributions of this paper consist in providing an analysis of the Italian BES over such a long period. As a result, the eight domains exhibit temporal tendencies that are different from the one of economic well-being. In particular, health, education, work and political participation show a pattern increasing over time (analogously to economic well-being), although at different growth rates, while an overall declining path emerges for the domains of security, environment and research and development. Moreover, we identify four main periods of the Italian history (before WWI, the Fascist period, the years from 1950 to 1990 and the most recent period) each characterized by different relations among the well-being domains.

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Notes

  1. See Hák et al. (2012) and Ciommi et al. (2013) for an up to date review of the most important indicators of subjective and objective well-being.

  2. See OECD (2008) for more details on composite indicators.

  3. Also denoted as the “ladder of research utilization” by Knott and Wildavsky (1980).

  4. The complete list of the indicators is available in Table 3.

  5. The indicators considered by Brandolini and Vecchi (2011) are GDP per capita and per equivalent person, child work and manual workers in industry including construction, Gini index and Atkinson index of inequality, male and female life expectancy at birth, the difference between male and female life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, the male height, gross enrolment rate for primary education and literacy rates.

  6. For examples, Human Development Index and distributionally-adjusted GDP measures.

  7. Francesco Crispi was an Italian patriot and statesman and governed as Prime Minister for 6 years, from 1887 until 1891 and again from 1893 until 1896.

  8. In the BES project, this variable accounts for the percentage of women aged 16–70 who are victim of physical violence.

  9. For a careful definition of the mentioned indicators refer to Ciommi et al. (2013).

  10. A comparison among BES domains and indicators and our approach is available online as a supplemental material.

  11. Note that, in contrast with the Mazziotta and Pareto definition of the AMPI, we do not have the space dimension since the unit of analysis is Italy measured over time. So, our modification coincides with AMPI removing the spatial dimension. In other words, we have a bi-dimensional matrix instead of the three-dimensional one.

  12. Note that, differently from Mazziotta and Pareto (2015), here we denote the time span with n rather than with t.

  13. The AMPIi described in Eq. (2) is a simplification of the original AMPI index introduced in Mazziotta and Pareto (2015), which attaches a sign to the penalty according to the polarity of the mean Mi. More in detail, if the mean Mi is positive, such that increasing values of Mi correspond to positive variations of the well-being, then the penalty coefficient is subtracted; on the contrary, if the mean Mi is negative, i.e. increasing values of Mi correspond to negative variations of the well-being, then the penalty coefficient is added. In our application, all the domains are positively related with the concept of well-being and, therefore, the penalty coefficient is always subtracted.

  14. For the analysis, we applied the package strucchange implemented by Zeileis et al. (2002) for the statistical software R (http://www.R-project.org).

  15. The graph of each series is available online as a supplemental material.

  16. As in van Zanden et al. (2014), we do not consider morbidity indicators due to the difficulties in tackling indicators, in the long run, that track aspects which compromise health, such as illness and injury.

  17. Here we focus on aspects of malnutrition instead of under-nutrition.

  18. ISTAT is our main source of information. Our data sources are: Serie storiche (henceforth, ISTAT HS), which is an on-line ongoing database of historical Italian data partly published in ISTAT (2011); and I.Stat, which is an ongoing data warehouse since 2002.

  19. Italian census was made in 1861, 1871, 1881, 1901, 1911, 1921, 1931, 1936, and every ten years after 1951. Vecchi (2011) provided an estimate also for the year 1891. Since we are looking at long run dynamics, a linear interpolation appears to be a good approximation.

  20. Evident peaks of mortality are associated to the wars; moreover, during the period 1918-19 mortality increases because of the pandemic flu, known as the Spanish flu.

  21. The “wheat battle” (Battaglia del Grano) was a policy implemented during the fascist regime in order to achieve self-sufficiency in wheat production in Italy. The campaign was successful in increasing the domestic production of wheat, and the consequent decrease in the trade deficit. However it drastically reduced other higher value productions that used to increase the revenues of big landowners, hence reducing the possibility to import food from foreign markets.

  22. Indeed, we may assume that there are limits both to the increase of human height (for biological reasons) and to the decrease of infant mortality (with zero as lower bound).

  23. Among relevant laws for education, we consider Casati law (1859), Coppino law (1877), Orlando law (1904), Credaro law (1911) and Gentile reform (1923).

  24. Unfortunately, data specific for age groups are not available.

  25. From 1883 to 1983 see INAIL (1983) and Statistiche Storiche e Banca Dati Statistica INAIL from: http://www.inail.it/internet/default/Statistiche/Statistichestoriche/Casiindennizzati-Tavolenazionali/index.html. Access on 16/07/2015.

  26. Williamson (1995) data were extended to 2011 and computed at 1988 basis by using hourly wage MEI and consumer prices available at OECD.Stat.

  27. While health and education strongly depend on policies and demographic changes (with low variability between subsequent years) this is not the case for accidents and labor market fluctuations.

  28. A similar trend can be found in Vecchi (2011).

  29. Giorgio Fuà was an Italian economist whose interests of research—among others—dealt with the national economic system and its long term development since the Italian unification and with the analysis of the peculiar features of the Italian economy.

  30. The year 1977 is identified as the beginning of the so called anni di piombo, the period of national political terrorism.

  31. That is, we do not produce a yearly composite index over the whole period, since interpolation makes no sense given that elections happen only in some specific years.

  32. Voters are literate men older than 21 years; illiterate can vote only if they have turned 30 years of age. Moreover, the vote is extended to any citizen who has already served in the military. Women will be allowed to vote only in 1945.

  33. Law n. 39/1975.

  34. Unfortunately, the index does not take into account effects of this sort of compulsory voting mechanism.

  35. Data are on crimes reported both with known and with unknown prosecutor.

  36. The time series analysis has to be conducted with great care; an increase in complaints of a specific offense does not necessarily correspond to a real increase of the phenomenon. In some cases, it may simply be the effect of the change in the propensity to complain (as happened for example in the last decade on complaints of sexual assault, for which the significant increase in complaints, has not always been matched by an increase in the phenomenon); in other cases the number of crimes uncovered can grow due to greater investigative effort of the police forces, determined by public anxiety for a specific type of crime.

  37. The camice nere were originally the paramilitary wing of the National Fascist Party. After 1923, they became an all-volunteer militia of the Kingdom of Italy. Its members were distinguished by their black uniforms and their loyalty to the Duce (leader) of Fascism, Benito Mussolini.

  38. See Baffigi (2015) for a detailed explanation of the computation method. Gross investment may be an upward biased measure of the soil use, since in the long run the upkeep plays an important role partially compensated by the large amount of ruin left, in particular, in rural areas.

  39. Law n. 394/1991, framework law on protected areas.

  40. After the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol, Italy starts to develop, publish and record pollutant emissions; moreover, it projects and implements programs to reduce them.

  41. Law n. 352/2000, framework law on forest fire.

  42. For a broad discussion about the human capital we refer to Riccardini (2015).

  43. The relative changes are computed as the difference between the final and the initial value of the period over the initial value. When the value of the series was not available at a particular year, we approximated it to the value of the closest year. We thank an anonymous referee who suggested to introduce this analysis.

  44. An appropriate analysis of sustainable well-being is beyond the scope of this paper, also due to the limited data availability for such a long time series. For a deep analysis of sustainability and well-being we refer, among others, to Riccardini (2014).

  45. Authors’ translation from Toniolo (2013).

  46. In particular, Veenhoven (2014) collected information on happiness for several countries from different sources, proposing an index of the average happiness or life satisfaction for each country. Life satisfaction in Italy is available since 1973.

  47. Kennedy observes that “it [GDP] measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile” on March 18th, 1968 at the University of Kansas. See: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/RFK-Speeches/Remarks-of-Robert-F-Kennedy-at-the-University-of-Kansas-March-18-1968.aspx.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Giorgio Alleva, Leonardo Becchetti, Enrico Giovannini, Filomena Maggino, Matteo Mazziotta, Fabiola Riccardini, Lucia Vergano and Stefano Zamagni for their helpful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to the participants at the 52-th Meeting of the Italian Society of Economics, Demography and Statistics (SIEDS) held in Ancona Fermo in May 2015 and to the participants at the AIQUAV Conference held in Florence in December 2015 for their interesting comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Finally, we would also like to express our sincere thanks to the Editor and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. This research was encouraged under the E-Frame project (SSH.201162-1). The general disclaimer applies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Social Sciences, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy

    Mariateresa Ciommi, Andrea Gentili, Barbara Ermini, Francesco M. Chelli & Mauro Gallegati

  2. Department of Economics, Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Andrea Gentili

  3. Department of Economics, Università degli Studi dell’Insubria, Varese, Italy

    Chiara Gigliarano

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  1. Mariateresa Ciommi
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Correspondence to Mariateresa Ciommi.

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Appendix

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Table 4 Indicators to each domain, their source, coverage and relationship with well-being
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Ciommi, M., Gentili, A., Ermini, B. et al. Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: The Well-Being of the Italians (1861–2011). Soc Indic Res 134, 473–509 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1450-y

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