Do sustainable well-being indicators affect GDP? Evidence from a longitudinal study in Italy based on BES approach

Sustainable development is a relatively recent approach to economic growth measure, which has the goal of measuring the standards of living in a more comprehensive way. Following this approach, the GDP is not the only right measure of economic growth and, for this reason, several Institutions (as IMF and OECD) have developed the concept of sustainable well-being, measured trough some other indicators in addition to the GDP. From Italy is coming a new approach in sustainable well-being measuring, called Benessere Equo e Sostenibile (BES). This project, proposed by ISTAT and CNEL, started in the 2013 and contains 12 dimensions of sustainable well-being which are examined in the paper. Several are the papers which have studied the relationship between GDP and sustainable indicators, in order to explain the impact on the economic growth. However, no studies are referred to the Italian approach in well-being measuring. The aim of this paper is to study the impact of BES indicators in determining the economic growth of Italian regions. This paper uses a longitudinal study to assess these dynamics, considering the data from 2013 to today for all the Italian regions. The results show that most of BES indicator don’t affect significantly GDP and for this reason their monitoring is still more important for sustainable purposes.