Original title: The Italian Municipality Equitable and Sustainable Well-being Index (MESWI)
Nicola Caravaggio, Giuliano Resce, Agapito Emanuele Santangelo · August 2026
Big regional statistics often hide what life is really like in individual towns. To solve this problem, researchers created a new local measure called the Municipal Equitable and Sustainable Well-being Index. They built it by expanding a national twelve-domain well-being framework into forty-nine indicators covering every municipality in Italy. By tracking these different parts of daily life town by town, they uncovered major local differences. The traditional gap between the North and South is the main divide, showing up much more strongly than the gap between inner and non-inner areasRemote towns that are far from major services like hospitals and train stations.. Towns inside the very same regions also differ sharply. Remote towns face weaker services and fewer socio-economic opportunities, but they achieve stronger environmental performance.
Imagine you are a school district deciding which schools need more funding. If you only look at the district average, a school with many struggling students can hide behind a few excellent ones. Now suppose you also assumed the main problem is distance from the city, so you ignore that two nearby schools can be completely different. In this paper, the researchers build a detailed score for every single town instead of averaging whole regions, and they find that the big split is North versus South, not remote versus connected.
For Italian mayors and regional planners, this means regional averages can hide which towns are actually struggling. A town's remoteness matters less than which part of the country it sits in, so policy money can be aimed at specific municipalities instead of whole regions.
The abstract does not report validation, uncertainty, or sensitivity of the index to indicator choice. It also does not explain what causes the North-South divide or whether unmeasured factors drive the patterns. The paper offers MESWI as a potential information base, not as a ready-made policy tool.
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The Italian Municipality Equitable and Sustainable Well-being Index (MESWI) — Nicola Caravaggio, Giuliano Resce, Agapito Emanuele Santangelo
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.