Subjective component is essential for the well-being definition

The aim of the paper is to contribute to the international debate on "going beyond Gross domestic product (Gdp)", looking for the adoption of further indicators, in addition to GdP, to measure equitable and sustainable well-being. Recently, the debate on how to measure the well-being, both for individuals and societies, has been an important issue for policy makers and public opinion. The changings of the last years (in life styles, economy, energy, environment) have pointed out the necessity to develop new statistical measures capable of guiding decision-makers, firms’ and citizens’ behaviors. The statement is that economic parameters alone are unsatisfactory / inadequate to evaluate societies’ progress and “should be complemented by social and environmental information and by measures of inequality and sustainability” (Istat-Cnel, 2014). In Italy, the project “Equitable and sustainable Well-being” was born by a joint initiative of National Council for Economics and Labour (Cnel) and the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) and it’s still available to receive researchers’ contributions to properly define the Well-being dimension. Well-being dimension is actually composed by 12 areas: Health, Education and training, Work and life balance, Economic well-being, Social relationships, Politics and Institutions, Security, Subjective well-being, Landscape and cultural heritage, Environment, Research and innovation, Quality of services. The dimensions are measured by way of 134 indicators in total, whose data come from different but official sources. In the first part, the paper deals with some remarks about the objective and subjective indicators belonging to the set. Then, we verify if the subjective component is important for Well-being definition: we add and remove the subjective indicators by the set, to test the changes in the model. Through multivariate techniques, we demonstrate that subjective indicators are essential to complete the dimension of Well-being.