Essays on the role of well-being and natural capital for a sustainable prosperity of countries

This dissertation, composed of three chapters, aims at highlighting the role of wellbeing and natural capital for the sustainable prosperity of countries following the “Beyond GDP” movement. The uncertainty about the interrelationship among man-made, social and natural capital and the need to measure and track the development pathways of countries, including interregional disparity, economic inequality, impact on the natural recourses and wellbeing, requires for further theoretical and empirical investigation. The emphasis of the thesis is on the empirical evidence about the different forms of capital and the fulfilment of the basic principle of economics: efficiency. The concept of efficiency means no waste of resources for attaining a given set of goals; unhappiness, economic inequality and environmental issues signal inefficiencies of our system. The ability of policy makers to propose solutions relies on understanding this complex relationship and managing its trade-offs with available economic tools. In this thesis, a novel use of datasets which combine socio-economic, wellbeing and environmental data for the UK and Italy is proposed to reflect on the empirical relationship of the forms of capital. Intentionally, the three papers focus on sub-regional and regional economic analysis to appreciate the heterogeneity of information that could be hidden in national standard macro-indicators.