Construction and Evolution of a Multidimensional Well-Being Index for the Spanish Regions Antonio Jurado • Jesus Perez-Mayo Accepted: 20 September 2010 / Published online: 13 April 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract The study presented here is an attempt to calculate a comparative multidimen- sional index of economic well-being for the Spanish Autonomous Communities. Based on the dimensions of adjusted consumption, real wealth, equity and economic security per inhabi- tant, we obtain one relative index using a system of uniform weightings, a second resulting from a factor analysis and a third provided by a DEA analysis. We elaborate the index for the year 2000 and for 2006, thereby providing the relative results with greater robustness and permitting some conclusions to be reached with regard to the evolution over time of the index. Keywords Economic well-being  Factor analysis  Indicators  DEA 1 Introduction The disparities in well-being evidenced by the Spanish Autonomous Communities 1 (the 17 political-administrative regions of Spain, CC.AA. in their Spanish initials), while having been for some time a cause for concern in economic and political debate, are currently entering a phase in which their quantification is increasingly important. On the one hand, European structural funds or the Spanish Interterritorial Compensation Fund (FCI) use principally macromagnitudes 2 as economic delimiters of shares, and could A. Jurado Department of Economics, University of Extremadura, Caceres, Spain J. Perez-Mayo (&) Department of Economics, University of Extremadura, Badajoz, Spain e-mail: jperez@unex.es 1 Some authors, such as Ayala et al. (2011), Garcı ´a-Luque et al. (2009), Pe ´rez-Mayo (2008), or Poggi (2007) for example, included the territorial issue in the analysis of poverty, deprivation and social exclusion in Spain. 2 The distribution of European structural funds is based, in the Objective 1 regions, solely on a percentage of average European income that indicates which regions will be recipients of such resources. However, the Spanish FCI (Interterritorial Compensation Fund) has to date employed a formula which, in addition to gross added value, takes into consideration: the de jure population, the migratory balance, the number of unemployed, geographical extent and population dispersion. Nevertheless, as we shall see below, our index is much more ambitious with regard to the multidimensionality captured. 123 Soc Indic Res (2012) 107:259–279 DOI 10.1007/s11205-011-9835-4