Building an Index of Human Isolation to Investigate the Isolation Dimensions of a Rural Area

The qualification of the concept of ‘development’ leads to the inclusion of social variables in the construction of indicators and indices. The World Conference on Human Rights (1993) and the World Summit on Social Development (1995) represented some of the steps that have led to the spread of the concept of Human Development (1990) measured by means the Human Development Index (HDI) taking into account not only income levels but also those of education and life expectancy. In addition, UNDP has developed the Gender Development Index (GDI-UN), the index of empowerment gender (IEG-UN) and the Human Poverty Index (HPI-1 and HPI-2) from which the present work starts for the construction of the 'index of human isolation’. In this framework, our main purpose is to verify the concept of well-being, based on relations and social capital too, taking into consideration the problems of a rural area (Wide Area of Daunian Mountains) and investigating the quality of life. The present paper is divided as follows: paragraph 2 describes the empirical analysis specifying the background and analyzing the selected area; paragraph 3 developing a Index of Human Isolation (IHI) and define the further steps of analysis that are a cluster analysis on the IHI and an econometric model. Then obtained results are presented. Finally, paragraph 4 draws the conclusions and proposes some policy indications