Effective growth policymaking: Estimating provincial territorial development potentials

This paper follows the view that for the implementation of a successful growth policy, differentials among local areas require both a deepened awareness of the state of place and a multidimensional measure of inequal- ities—by considering both intangible and tangible features of the development. To achieve an effective growth policymaking, an innovative approach is proposed. The approach consists of two main steps. Firstly, the defi- nition of an index for assessing the potential of local development—designed by using Principal Component Analysis model on a sample of 110 Italian provinces—allows vertical comparison among the observation in order to evaluate the level of reached development; besides two further sub-indexes offer specific indication about the multidimensionality of the analysed phenomenon. Secondly, by using a Sen Index, the measurement of the distance between the position in the ranking of the observation and a calculated threshold offers punctual information on the weights that could be assigned to the provinces for a financial resource programming. The findings of an empirical investigation reveal that the proposed approach has adequate to estimating provincial territorial development potentials.