Guidotti R., Michele C., Pedreschi D., Pennachioli D. Going beyond GDP to nowcast well-being using retail market data. In: NetSci-X 2016 - Advances in Network Science. 12th International Conference and School (Wroclaw, Poland, 11-13 January 2016). Proceedings, pp. 29 - 42. Adam Wierzbicki, Ulrik Brandes, Frank Schweitzer, Dino Pedreschi. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 9564). Springer, 2016. |
Abstract (English) |
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. | |
URL: | http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-28361-6_3 | |
DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-319-28361-6_3 | |
Subject | Shopping behavior Economic sophistication Complex network analysis H.2.8 Database Applications. Data Mining 68W01 |
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