Social inclusion is one of the key challenges of the European Union (EU)\ud
Sustainable Development Strategy. We use four indicators from EU policies to measure\ud
social inclusion for the 27 member countries of Europe. In particular, we aggregate the four\ud
indicators in a multiplicative composite indicator via a DEA-BoD approach with weights\ud
determined endogenously with proportion constraints. We obtain a score of social inclu-\ud
sion that allows us to grade the 27 EU countries from 2006 to 2010. In this way, we\ud
highlight the specific role played by the four indicators in determining improvements and\ud
deteriorations of social inclusion during the European phase of the financial and economic\ud
crisis
We use data by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to build a Composite Financial Development Index (CFDI) alternative to the WEF financial index. Unlike the WEF index, the CFDI optimally combines seven dimensions with non‐fixed weights determined endogenously without recourse to subjective opinions of experts. The CFDI is obtained by applying a Data Envelopment Analysis linear programming model with proportion restrictions on weights calculated in a Benefit‐of‐Doubt approach. In this way, the CFDI scores allow us to group 60 countries by different levels of financial development identifying dimensions that contribute to good or poor financial performances, taking into account the different characteristics of the financial systems in the countries under investigation.
Social differences within countries may partly explain the lack of economic convergence and the persistence of regional disparities. The case of Italy is emblematic: economic gap between North and South remains at high levels with large differences in social capital and in trust. In this paper, we use the micro data from the ISTAT “Aspects of Daily Life” Survey to build a measure of “trust in others” and a measure of “trust in institutions” through a latent class model to attribute a trust score to the Italian households and the Italian regions and, in this way, to add elements of knowledge useful to policies. Our measures confirm a persistent territorial divide although the regional mapping appears more complex than the classical North–South partition. At last, a discussion on the household typology shows that the territorial gaps of trust persist even among households with similar socio-economic characteristics
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