Marco Grasso

Author's titles

Ranking Quality of Life in the European Union digital

Year: 2007

This article provides a multi-dimensional index for evaluating well-being in the EU. It begins with an overview of an analytical approach that goes beyond utilitarianism: Dasgupta’s quality of life framework, which is defined according to the goals of EU policies and based on a set of indicators that are both constituents and determinants of well-being. This framework is then used to draw up an index, based on a Borda ranking, of the EU member countries in terms of their economic and social well-being. This is followed by discussion of the correlation between the ranking and the indicators selected.

€ 6.00

Freedoms, institutions and sustainable human development according to Sen’s capability approach digital

by Marco Grasso, Stefano Pareglio

Year: 2006

The aim of this paper is to outline the role of instrumental freedoms and institutions in the achievement of sustainable human development, doing so according to the perspective of Sen’s capability approach. Each area of sustainability can be represented by a set of driving forces, response variables and state variables. State variables denote constitutive freedoms, the achieved functionings chosen from the capability set. Their variations are produced by driving force variables. The latter are, in their turn, influenced by response variables triggered by institutions and instrumental freedoms. We map a selected set of variables related to the environmental dimension in order to show how instrumental freedoms and institutions influence sustainable human development.

€ 6.00