Measuring Competitiveness: A Composite Indicator for Italian Municipalities

Abstract

This study measures territorial competitiveness at the municipal level in Italy, by proposing a robust composite indicator based on variables not yet used in the literature. The underlying theoretical framework is identified based on the literature on regional competitiveness. The proposed indicator consists of the following seven dimensions of competitiveness: Education, Job, Economic Wellbeing, Territory and Environment, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Infrastructures and Mobility. Data are retrieved mainly from administrative sources, for 2014 and 2015. In the building process, three aggregation methods are compared: a compensatory method, the arithmetic mean, and two partially compensatory methods, the geometric mean and the Adjusted Mazziotta-Pareto Index (AMPI). The arithmetic mean turns out to be the most robust method among the three considered, but the AMPI is the most robust method among the two partially compensatory methods. All the methods considered agree in identifying Innovation and Entrepreneurship as the most influential pillars in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The detailed geographical focus provides specific insights into territorial competitiveness in Italy. It emerges a rather heterogeneous picture of municipal competitiveness within the Italian regions. Highly competitive municipalities are present in every region, though with different concentration levels.

Measuring the resilience of rural tourism in Indonesia using the Adjusted Mazziotta-Pareto index

“…One method of measuring resilience is the Mazziotta-Pareto index (MPI) and the Adjusted Mazziotta-Pareto index (AMPI), which are the most powerful methods of the two partial compensation methods (Scaccabarozzi et al, 2022). The MPI is a formative composite index to summarize a series of indicators that are considered irreplaceable.…”

“…Therefore, in this research, we use basic concepts regarding resilience and develop a synthetic measurement of resilience based on variables that are proxied from the parameters of the capacity and performance aspects of tourist villages. This synthetic measurement approach has been used to measure the competitiveness index of cities in Italy (Scaccabarozzi et al, 2022).…”

“…The dimensions used to measure tourism performance can be considered proxies for the phenomenon (Proag, 2014). Considering this concept, building a composite indicator is the right approach to measure the tourism resilience index (Scaccabarozzi et al, 2022).…”

“…Considering tourism's complex and multidimensional characteristics, an appropriate approach is needed to determine tourism resilience. One way is to use a composite index (Mazziotta and Pareto, 2017a), which can be used to measure concepts that cannot be captured by one indicator alone (Scaccabarozzi et al, 2022). The method provides a tool for stakeholders to gain a comprehensive and integrated understanding of tourism destination resilience and provides powerful information that policymakers can use to analyze current policies, negotiate conditions, prepare future plans (Gallego and Font, 2019), and make assessments in terms of resource allocation (Panda et al, 2016).…”

Measuring Economic Resilience of Tourism Villages: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Pre and Post-Covid-19 Pandemic

“…AMPI is a composite index that allows data comparison across units and time, resulting in compatibility with the spatiotemporal approach. The choice of the AMPI method also corresponds to the characteristics of a tourism system that is complex, dynamic, and associated with many variables (Baggio, 2020;Lv et al, 2021) so that it cannot be measured by a single indicator (Mazziotta & Pareto, 2013;Mazziotta & Pareto, 2017;Scaccabarozzi et al, 2022).…”