The Agenda 2030 poses critical elements regarding the transition towards a more sustainable development. This paper aims at exploring and comparing the path of sustainable development within the United States and China at the subnational level. An index of Integrated Sustainable Development is introduced to measure local sustainable development on an internationally-comparable scale. This Index is computed both at the national and subnational level and the resulting scores are compared within and across the two countries, also through the adoption of convergence and cluster analysis, allowing to answer four questions: Are the US and China moving towards a sustainable development agenda? Are the current achievements uniformly distributed within the two countries? Are states/provinces converging towards a more uniform level of sustainable development? Do the existing differences and analogies between states and provinces give rise to common clusters across the two countries? The results lead to one robust conclusion: while the US can claim a better result in the national and subnational rankings of sustainable development, China exhibits a more balanced achievement in terms of synergies across Goals and spatial distribution. Nonetheless, both countries are characterized by subnational disparities and scarce achievements of Planet-related Goals. Policy recommendations are discussed accordingly.

China has recorded impressive economic achievements driving the structural transformation of its society. However, this transformation is marked by rising inequality, environmental pollution and stark provincial disparities. In 2015, the launching of the Agenda 2030 provided a common ground at the international level conceptualizing the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper analyses the provincial performances towards the Agenda 2030 in the period 2015-19 by introducing the integrated sustainable development index cluster; convergence and econometric analyses are then used to explore synergies and trade-offs among SDGs. The empirical results capture the dynamics of sustainable development of China's provinces and provide a clearer understanding of how policies may influence different the SDGs' achievements, exploring the relationship between environmental versus different aspects of development. These results are used to draw policy recommendations that highlight the importance of identifying the appropriate mix of strategies to promote integrated sustainable development.

A large body of literature has developed numerous unidimensional and multidimensional indicators to identify energy-poor households, also with the aim of targeting public policies. They all have pros and cons and may identify different populations. How do they relate to each other? How should they be used in a country such as Italy where energy poverty has not yet been officially defined? We frame these research questions in a context of general social vulnerability in which several dimensions of poverty intersect. Using SILC data (EU and IT modules) for the period 2004–2015 we compare four widely used unidimensional indicators and provide evidence—for the Italian case—that complementarity among the indicators prevails since the complexity of energy poverty requires a combination of metrics to capture various vulnerabilities. Our results confirm the set of relevant factors affecting the probability of being energy poor which are indicated in the related economics literature, regardless of which indicator is used. They may help tailor policies to tackle the phenomenon. Based on these findings, we strongly support the idea of using a dashboard of different metrics to measure energy poverty to design effective policies.

This manual has been written to respond to the need of making available an exhaustive compilation in the Italian language of the main topics and problems of the political economy of development in poor countries. So far, a discussion of such topics in Italian has not been available. The drafting of this manual has benefitted from the teaching and research experience of several academics of the faculty of economics of the university of Florence. Part 1 focuses on key methodological approaches derived from the theory of collective choices. In turn, Part 2 discusses the orthodox and heterodox macroeconomic reforms applied in developing countries, and their problems. Part 3 illustrates the domestic policies that have been or should have been adopted in the field of food security, land reform, environmental sustainability, taxation, social spending, labor markets and population. Part 4 discusses then the domestic policy reforms in the field of international trade, foreign direct investments, capital flows and international migration. Last, Part 5 illustrates the historical experience of five policy regimes (i.e. the import substituting industrialization, redistributive approaches, the Asian Miracle, Washington Consensus, and Sustainable Development) that have been introduced in the non-socialist developing countries between the decolonization of the 1950s and the present time. The methodological approach followed in the manual starts from an evaluation of the real-life impact on growth, income distribution, the wellbeing of the population, and the environment of the policies adopted during each policy regime and in the main economic areas. Whenever the policy measures introduced in the past generated unsatisfactory results, the manual suggests possible alternatives inspired by the structuralist and Keynesian schools.

After many years of outstanding GDP growth and structural changes, China is now facing an economic slowdown. This paper aims to analyse the effects of this slowdown on individual well-being, from a multidimensional and provincial perspective.The empirical analysis is based on data obtained from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, for the 2011 and 2015 waves. The notions of moderate prosperity, harmony and balanced growth pursued by the Chinese Government are used to select nine dimensions. These dimensions – based on 56 variables – are aggregated into an individual well-being index using the Multidimensional Synthesis of Indicators technique.The econometric results reveal that, in the 2011–2015 period, individual multidimensional well-being stagnated; moreover, some dimensions were affected much more than others, according to individual characteristics (e.g. age, gender) and geographical differences (e.g. urban/rural, east/west provinces).This creates new challenges for the central and provincial governments of China, in their pursuit of a more ‘harmonious’ and balanced development.

Energy poverty is broadly associated with the more general concept of income poverty. However, this phenomenon is more rarely linked to socio-economic inequalities. Recent works in the related literature are pursuing this line of research to explore if energy poverty is associated with a social vulnerability status with roots in structural inequities (Simcock et al. 2018). These factors are unevenly distributed in space and therefore, determine a geographical variability of energy poverty. Following Galvin (2019), in this paper we study if a relation between economic inequality and energy poverty exists also in the highly heterogeneous context of the Italian territory. We test this relationship on households living in Italian regions controlling for other variables influencing between-regions variation in energy poverty. Moreover, in the empirical analysis we use both consensual and expenditure-based indicators - and also a combination of them - to verify the extent to which the two methods to measure energy poverty contribute to understanding this complex phenomenon, as claimed in some of the literature. Our multivariate analyses confirm that income inequality significantly correlates with energy poverty indicators when Italian regions are the units of analysis. This suggests that strategies to address energy poverty should be comprehensive and spatially implemented.

In multidimensional indexes employed to measure well‐being and deprivation, income is sometimes included and sometimes excluded. The aim of this paper is to reconsider the role of income in the measurement of multidimensional well‐being by recognizing that it can indirectly contribute to individual well‐being, even if it is not regarded as a goal in itself. This involves introducing a new composite index: the Income‐adjusted Multidimensional Synthesis of Indicators (I‐MSI). To illustrate this index, individual‐level data from the 2015 China Household and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) are analyzed. Results confirm the soundness ofI‐MSIapproach as a multidimensional aggregation method and show that it can capture disparities across Chinese macro‐regions and variations among different segments of society.

The paper analyses multidimensional patterns of development across Chinese provinces over the last two decades (1993-2016) from a balanced or 'harmonious society' perspective. The harmonious multidimensional index and other indexes are introduced to explore different development patterns among Chinese provinces. In order to analyse multidimensional convergence amongst the provinces, beta- and sigma-convergence methods are applied. The results indicate that recent efforts to move towards a 'harmonious society' are paying off, although notable differences across provinces remain and specific domains deserve special consideration.

Recently the topic of multidimensional poverty in China has drawn the attention of many scholars discussing the China’s Path to the New Era. The main goal of this paper is to measure China’s achievements in terms of multidimensional wellbeing and poverty in 1989 and 2011. We are interested in measuring and comparing its distribution among different groups (based on geography and socio-economic conditions). The main originality of this paper is the use of the Multidimensional Synthesis of Indicators (MSI) (a new class of indexes Mauro et al. 2016, 2017) which is applied for the first time using individual level (microdata) and for the first time to China. For the sake of completeness, we computed also the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) a well-established multidimensional index). In this way we also want to see whether these two poverty measurements are overlapping or not, and in case what triggers the differences. Poverty alleviation has been an impressive outcome of the reform programs China launched in 1978. According to the Millennium Development Goals report, between 1970 and 2000 the number of rural Chinese population without food and clothing decreased from 250 million (30.7% of the total rural population) to 32 million (3.5%). Equally impressive is the drop in monetary poverty: according to the World Bank data, the proportion of poor people drop from 66.6% in 1990 to 7.9% in 2011. Despite these achievements, the fight against poverty in China remains a target priority, now related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to the 13th Five-Years Plan, which announced the willingness of eradicating poverty from China. The commitment of the government in poverty alleviation involves monetary subsidies (the 低 保 “DiBao” program) as well as medical insurances schemes and education subsidies. On the other hand, especially between 1984 and 2003, Chinese reforms were “unbalanced”: the resources were allocated with a bias toward urban and coastal areas, and the central government reduced its commitment to provide social security. Poverty is not only a matter of money shortage. This fact is nowadays widely recognized by economists. The same SDGs formulation states that “Poverty is more than the lack of income and resources to ensure a sustainable livelihood”. Indeed, allowing people to satisfy their needs in terms of health, education, social security etc. is an essential aspect of poverty mitigation. This is even more true in China, where the fast GDP growth recorded in the last decade will not be feasible in the future (the so-called “New Normal”). Please do not circulate without permission and please do not quote 2 Most of the recent papers on multidimensional poverty in China adopt the MPI (Alkire and Foster 2011), sometimes with slight changes in the methodology or in the dimensions considered. The MPI applies a double cutoff to a set of poverty indicators to determine how many households are multidimensionally poor and how many deprivations they suffer. Each of these cutoffs, necessary to compute the MPI, implies a loss of information. Moreover, the traditional MPI specification allows to calculate poverty only at household level, without differentiation between genders or age groups. This paper enriches the literature in a threefold way. Firstly, the multidimensional wellbeing and poverty in China is studied by applying in this context for the first time the Multidimensional Synthesis Indicator (MSI), a multidimensional index proposed by Mauro, Biggeri and Maggino (2016, 2017). Secondly, this paper applies for the first time the MSI technique to micro-data, exploiting its capacity of penalizing the acute deprivation at individual level. Finally, we created an original version of the MSI by modifying its underlying equation to address the issue of the role of income in multidimensional wellbeing. The empirical analysis is based on individual-level data from the China Household and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). The CHNS sample is randomly selected to include about 4,400 households spread over nine provinces (plus three municipal cities) and nine years. The first survey round was carried out in 1989, the last in 2011. The questionnaires investigate several aspects of wellbeing, including the data necessary to replicate the MPI and other information that we considered in the MSI. The aim of the MSI is to synthetize different information relative to various dimensions of wellbeing in a single index. With this index, we can penalize more the heterogeneity in cases of poorer households, whose coping strategies are likely to be more limited. After synthetizing our information, we used the MSI to investigate the level of poverty over time, across provinces and across different socio-economic groups. We included 8 dimensions in the MSI. To reduce as much as possible the arbitrariness in the choice of the indicators, we referred to the BMI, the HDI, the Capability Approach (Nussbaum, 2011) and the MPI itself. The dimensions considered thus are: Health, Education, Nutrition, Housing, Sanitation, Work, Free Time, Assets. Income, deliberately excluded from the eight dimensions, is included in the formula to calibrate the heterogeneity penalization (the poorer the family, the higher the penalization). This derives from the assumption that richer families are more able to cope with a shock in a single dimension. The paper is structured into six sections. The first section introduce the paper aims and structure. The second section presents the literature and trends of Chinese poverty and wellbeing in the last 30 years. Then, the third section presents the the MSI and the MPI and their properties. Section fourth presents the data. Section fifth presents the main results, while in section sixth the discussion and main conclusions are given. Please do not circulate without permission and please do not quote