Il contributo degli indicatori territoriali nelle stime composte di povertà a livello sub-nazionale: Alcune evidenze empiriche

Special estimators, known in the literature as Small Area Estimators, “borrow strength” from related areas across space and/or time or through auxiliary information which is supposed to be correlated to the variable of interest. In such a way, they allow to obtain reliable poverty estimates at a small geographical area level where the domain-specific sample is not large enough to support direct poverty estimates of adequate precision. In a previous paper (Quintano et al., 2006), we improved the estimation process quality, in terms of precision and efficiency, of some income poverty measures for Italian provinces (NUTS3). Through an analysis of the main results we obtained, the aim of this work is to evaluate the territorial indicators contribution to income poverty composite estimates and to access the degree of improvement of their efficiency level. Furthermore, the work aims to evaluate the goodness, in terms of explicative power, of the territorial indicators that we selected to define synthetic estimates; in such a way, on the one hand, we investigate the territorial indicators as regards each poverty measure and, on the other hand, we analysis the impact on the poverty estimates of the auxiliary variables derived from two different data sources. Exploring socio-economic factors contributing to deprivation levels and living standards is likely very important to define policy to contrast the poverty and social exclusion.