Does the Regional Well-Being affect Neet Phenomenon? Evidence from Italy

GDP has been the most widely used measure index to explain the factors contributing to economic and social growth. However, it seems to be a limited measure as it fails to provide images about the decline in people’s lives, such as unemployment, health, safety and social interactions. For this reason, following the line of research that deals with how the quality of life affects economic growth, the objective of the present work is to Study how the effects of the indicators of well-being attenuate the phenomenon of those who cannot engaged in education, employment or training (NEET). Focusing on the Italian regions, we implement a Principal Component Analysis (PCA), in which we have extracted synthetic indicators for each of the dimensions of well-being under consideration, and the SYS-GMM procedure. The main findings reveal that, among the regional indicators of well-being, the pillars associated with culture and leisure, the environment, the provision of public services, health status, personal safety, and social relations contribute to reducing the phenomenon of NEET in Italy.