In recent times, composite indicators have gained astounding popularity in a wide variety of research areas. Their adoption by global institutions has further captured the attention of the media and policymakers around the globe, and their number of applications has surged ever since. This increase in their popularity has solicited a plethora of methodological contributions in response to the substantial criticism surrounding their underlying framework. In this paper, we put composite indicators under the spotlight, examining the wide variety of methodological approaches in existence. In this way, we offer a more recent outlook on the advances made in this field over the past years. Despite the large sequence of steps required in the construction of composite indicators, we focus particularly on two of them, namely weighting and aggregation. We find that these are where the paramount criticism appears and where a promising future lies. Finally, we review the last step of the robustness analysis that follows their construction, to which less attention has been paid despite its importance. Overall, this study aims to provide both academics and practitioners in the field of composite indices with a synopsis of the choices available alongside their recent advances.

Cellini R. and Torrisi G. Regional resilience in Italy: a very long-run analysis, Regional Studies. Resilience is a concept referring to the manner in which systems react to, and recover from, shocks. According to several recent analyses ‘resilience’ can explain different regional economic performances. However, this study indicates that this explanation is quite unconvincing when applied to the Italian regions in the very long run (1890–2009). Only few shocks emerge to have specific impact effects differing across regions, while the recovery experience is ever spatially homogeneous. Hence, it is difficult to discern genuine differences in regional resilience. This evidence can be interpreted as a reason why the regional differences in Italy are huge and persistent.

This paper deals with the relationship between decentralisation, regional economic development, and income inequality within regions. Using multiplicative interaction models and regionally aggregated microeconomic data for more than 100 000 individuals in the European Union (EU), it addresses two main questions. First, whether fiscal and political decentralisation in Western Europe has an effect on within-regional interpersonal inequality. Second, whether this potential relationship is mediated by the level of economic development of the region. The results of the analysis show that greater fiscal decentralisation is associated with lower interpersonal income inequality, but, as regional income rises, further decentralisation is connected to a lower decrease in inequality. This finding is robust to the measurement and definition of income inequality, as well as to the weighting of the spatial units by their population size.

We consider the issue of ranking regions with respect to a range of economic and social variables. Departing from the current practice of aggregating different dimensions via a composite index, usually based on an arithmetic mean, we instead use stochastic multi-attribute acceptability analysis (SMAA). SMAA considers the ‘whole space’ of weights for the considered dimensions. The methodology is applied to the ranking of Italian regions, showing that although the north–south divide is definitely wider than the one measured simply in terms of gross domestic product. There are southern regions that perform generally better than those belonging to their broad region: a kind of ‘northern regions within the southern broad region’. This result poses interesting questions about the uneven development of Italian regions.

The authors analyse the effects of public spending on tourism in the regions of Italy by adopting a cross-sectional regression analysis approach. The evaluation is made possible by the availability of a database under the project entitled ‘Conti Pubblici Territoriali’ (‘Regional Public Accounts’) of the Ministero dello sviluppo economico (Ministry of Economic Development), wherein the spending of all public institutions is aggregated for each region and classified according to different criteria, including the sectoral criterion. Furthermore, the effects of public spending on tourism on the tourism attractiveness of various regions are also investigated. Generally, the effectiveness of public spending appears to be deficient.