The Chair on Small Area methods for Multidimensional Poverty and living conditions Indicators in EU – SAMPIEU has been awarded to Prof. Monica Pratesi for the triennium 2018-2021.
It aims at educating students to the study of local statistics on poverty and living conditions in order to provide reliable evidence to monitor EU regional policy. It also aims at teaching how to communicate the results to local stakeholders, showing how to provide evidence to evaluate the impact of local projects co-financed by the EU funds.
The aims of the Chair are four:
- Enhancing the students’ and stakeholders’ abilities to understand and analyse the existing set of data and multidimensional indicators on poverty and living conditions indicators in Europe and, when needed, aggregating the various dimensions into a single index.
- Building up and teaching a statistical tool-box of Small Area Methods in order to break down the values of the indicators to produce detailed geographical representations of poverty in Europe (poverty mapping). This also using the modern data sources as Big data repositories. Spreading the teaching materials and the content of the courses through a Massive Open Online Course.
- Enhancing the research and applications in the field of the Chair promoting a Start-up research event at the end of the Chair. The applicants (students preparing the thesis, PhD students, young researchers) will be educated to communicate the results to the stakeholders, to feed the evidence–based process of policy making with flash-estimates and to provide guidance on what might be the problems that arise in the reliability of the estimates and in the quantitative evaluation of regional policy
- Ensuring easy and transparent dissemination of the information on the project. The dissemination plan aims to link different target groups (students, stakeholders like researchers in statistics and official statistics, policy makers), general public who have varied interest in local poverty and living conditions.
The chair will establish a profitable connection with the Jean Monnet modules-courses Labour Economics in an European Perspective (LEEP) https://labourecoeu.ec.unipi.it/ held by Lorenzo Corsini (2017) and The Economics of European Regions: Theory, Empirics, and Policy (EERTEP) https://eer.ec.unipi.it/ held by Davide Fiaschi 2017.
Connections will be established also with the project “Development and Harmonisation of Socially Responsible Investment in the European Union” (DHRSIEU) http://dhrsieu.ec.unipi.it/ coordinated by Luca Spataro. Networking will strengthen the dialogue between the academic world and policy-makers, in particular with the aim of enhancing governance of EU policies al local level.