The Unbalance Penalisation Method for Metrics of Social Progress

This study contributes to the debate on the development of aggregate metrics of societal progress. Summarising societal progress into a single number poses various methodological challenges, including the choice of indicators, normalisation, weighting and aggregation. This paper addresses the issue of aggregation in the case of metrics of well-being and uses as a case study the European Union regional Social Progress Index—EU-SPI—published by the European Commission. The index is an aggregate measure of 55 social and environmental indicators observed for all the European regions grouped into 12 components. In metrics of this type, while complete substitutability among components is rarely acceptable, controlling their level of substitutability is highly desirable. To this aim, we adopt a modified version of the unbalance penalisation approach originally proposed by Casadio Tarabusi and Guarini (Soc Indic Res 112:9–45, 2013). A penalisation is applied to the regions whose performance ac...