Poverty Adaptation, Multidimensional Well-Being and Regional Disparities in Italy: A Statistical Matching Approach

The deep transformations affecting nowadays the economies have an impact on individuals’ well-being, which represents the foundation for sustainable development and poverty reduction. Well-being is a multidimensional concept and the capacity to measure its different aspects is of crucial importance for designing policies. This chapter delves into a particular aspect and presents an analysis of how people’s subjective well-being adapts to poverty by digging deeper into the impact a variation in economic condition has, with respect to the previous year, on overall life satisfaction and several domains of life. To investigate if regional disparities in these relationships exist, the analysis is developed for the whole country and the main macro-areas (North vs Centre-South). To overcome the problem of obtaining information on poverty and subjective well-being, we suggest using a statistical matching approach. Findings show that adaptation is rejected for people entering into poverty at the current time or when a poor person’s condition worsens over the last year. Significant regional differences in the SWB-poverty adaptation nexus are detected, especially for economic and health domains. Findings support place-based policies aimed at reducing disparities in the living conditions of the residents.