[open-economics] Updated Dataset - YourTopia Italia

Wed Apr 25 03:00:27 UTC 2012

Dear all,

I will give you an update on the progress of YourTopia, and remind members
of the Open Economics list that they could join
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/yourtopia in order to get more
detailed updates about the status of the application.

We had a discussion about how we could make the YourTopia application a bit
more interesting as many of the indicators are highly correlated with GDP
per capita and between each other and for that reason the Northern regions
always came first (especially Bolzen and Trento, which are only
controversially Italian).

In a last attempt to make this a bit more interesting, Rosamaria and I have
added a last category - "Social" or "Social life", consisting of three
indicators where the Southern states fare better than the North:

   - *Friends Networks: *"Frequency of meeting friends in free time of
   persons aged 6 and over reflects social participation" (More is better)
   - *Nuptiality: *"The generic marriage rate or the ratio between the
   number of marriages in the reference and the average amount of the resident
   population of the same year" (More is better)
   - *Separations:* "The generic separation rate is constructed as the
   ratio between the number of separations granted in the reference and the
   average amount of the resident population of the same year." (More is worse)

Social life and participation as well as family cohesion are also important
factors in social progress that are often ignored in measuring human
development, which is why we decided to include them.

As "youth unemployment rate" is too similar to "neets" and thus repetitive,
we also replaced employment2 with another more interesting variable:

   - *Dependency ratio: *The dependency ratio is obtained by dividing the
   population in active age (0 to 14 years and 65 years and over) population
   of working age (15 to 64 years). This ratio, which is usually multiplied by
   one hundred, measures the load on the population of working age population.
   Values above 50 percent indicates a situation of generational imbalance.

@Marian, this is the last dataset update, I hope it won't cause too much
work to update, I have added the data series to the dataset and done all
the labels like the rest.

@Rosamaria, could you check the Italian translations? They are marked in
red on the Series Metadata sheet:
"
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AogGMvffTHrgdFFjQy1qVWJGT1IteEhPallQbGlpbmc#gid=1
"

I suggest the following re-naming of the basic categories into more generic
titles

Employment >> Labour Market
Wealth >> Equality OR Household Income

@Marian, would it be problematic to have two words for the categories?

I think Wealth is really not appropriate because this category is more
about the income of the family and how it compares to others (GINI, poverty
incidence and satisfaction with economic situation). GDP per capita was
added to the dataset just as a reference but we could drop it from the
final application (replace with Social Life category which contains three
indicators).

If you have any comments or questions, please give us your feedback.

Velichka
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