TY - GEN
T1 - Going beyond GDP to nowcast Well-Being using retail market data
AU - Guidotti, Riccardo
AU - Coscia, Michele
AU - Pedreschi, Dino
AU - Pennacchioli, Diego
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - One of the most used measures of the economic health of a nation is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP): the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. GDP, prosperity and well-being of the citizens of a country have been shown to be highly correlated. However, GDP is an imperfect measure in many respects. GDP usually takes a lot of time to be estimated and arguably the well-being of the people is not quantifiable simply by the market value of the products available to them. In this paper we use a quantification of the average sophistication of satisfied needs of a population as an alternative to GDP. We show that this quantification can be calculated more easily than GDP and it is a very promising predictor of the GDP value, anticipating its estimation by six months. The measure is arguably a more multifaceted evaluation of the well-being of the population, as it tells us more about how people are satisfying their needs. Our study is based on a large dataset of retail micro transactions happening across the Italian territory.
AB - One of the most used measures of the economic health of a nation is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP): the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. GDP, prosperity and well-being of the citizens of a country have been shown to be highly correlated. However, GDP is an imperfect measure in many respects. GDP usually takes a lot of time to be estimated and arguably the well-being of the people is not quantifiable simply by the market value of the products available to them. In this paper we use a quantification of the average sophistication of satisfied needs of a population as an alternative to GDP. We show that this quantification can be calculated more easily than GDP and it is a very promising predictor of the GDP value, anticipating its estimation by six months. The measure is arguably a more multifaceted evaluation of the well-being of the population, as it tells us more about how people are satisfying their needs. Our study is based on a large dataset of retail micro transactions happening across the Italian territory.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84955305209&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-28361-6_3
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-28361-6_3
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84955305209
SN - 9783319283609
VL - 9564
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 29
EP - 42
BT - Advances in Network Science - 12th International Conference and School, NetSci-X 2016, Proceedings
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 12th International Conference and School on Advances in Network Science, NetSci-X 2016
Y2 - 11 January 2016 through 13 January 2016
ER -