Composite indices have been increasingly recognized as a useful tool for measuring complex and multidimensional phenomena, such as development, poverty, quality of life, well-being, globalization, competitiveness, freedom, and so on. In particular, they allow to assess or rank the performance of a set of statistical units (e.g., countries or geographical areas) based on a set of individual indicators that have no common meaningful unit of measurement or obvious way to be weighed (e.g., “Life expectancy at birth” and “Gross national income per capita”), in order to make comparisons, benchmarking, policy analysis and public communication.

Technically, a composite index is a mathematical combination (or aggregation as it is termed) of a set of indicators that represent the different dimensions of a phenomenon to be measured. The idea of summarizing a complex phenomenon into a single number is not straightforward, as it involves both theoretical and methodological assumptions that need to be assessed carefully to avoid producing results of dubious analytic rigour.

One of the major criticisms of composite indices is that their simple ‘big picture’ results may invite users (especially policy-makers) to draw simplistic analytical or policy conclusions. We propose to overcome the problem of calculating a single number, by constructing an interval of potential values of the composite index. The interval is called ‘performance interval’ and it is constructed depending on the level of compensability of individual indicators.

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University Degree in Statistics and Ph.D. in "Applied Social Sciences", he is a researcher at the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat).

He is General Secretary of the Italian Society of Economics, Demography and Statistics (SIEDS)and member of the board of the Italian Association for Quality-of-Life Studies (AIQUAV).

His main research interests are composite indicators and no-sampling errors in surveys.

He is the author of many articles in academic journals, and co-author of two books: "Open issues in composite indicators. A starting point and a reference on some state-of-the-art issues" (RomaTrE-Press, 2021) and "Gli indici sintetici" (Giappichelli, 2020).

PhD in "Methodological Statistics", is a researcher at the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat). He is a senior member of the Italian Statistical Society (SIS) and reviewer for "Social Indicators Research". His main research interests are composite indicators, multivariate data analysis and data mining.

He is the author of numerous articles in academic journals, and co-author of two books: "Open issues in composite indicators. A starting point and a reference on some state-of-the-art issues" (RomaTrE-Press, 2021) and "Gli indici sintetici" (Giappichelli, 2020).