rivista italiana di economia demografia e statistica - Sieds

Rivista Italiana di Economia Demografia e Statistica 145
Patil G. P., Taillie C. 2004. Upper level set scan statistic for detecting arbitrarily shaped
hotspots. Environmental and Ecological Statistics, n. 11, pagg. 183-197.
Takahashi K., Yokoyama T., Tango T. 2004. FleXScan: Software for the flexible spatial
scan statistic. National Institute of Public Health, Japan.
SUMMARY
Hot spot of poverty: some comparison among several urban areas
Poverty clusters have high concentration of poor people, but that does not mean
that everyone living in them is poor. While poverty is widely accepted to be an
inherently multi-dimensional concept, it has proved very difficult to develop
measures that both capture this multidimensionality and make comparisons over
time and space easy: for example, in poverty areas earnings are lower and
unemployment is higher, as well as adverse housing and neighbourhood conditions
are more frequent. The fuzzy set approach to multidimensional poverty
measurement is enjoying increasing popularity A different but strongly related
issue concerns the geoinformatic surveillance for poverty hot-spot detection: hotspot
means a local “outbreak” of persistent poverty typologies. Circle-based
spatial-scan statistics (Kulldorff, 1997, Patil and Taille, 2004, Aldstat and Getis,
2006) is a popular approach, and is now widely used by many governments and
academic researchers.
In this paper we define a [0-1]-valued fuzzy poverty measure for the census
sections in the urban area of Bologna, Cagliari and Naples, in Italy: data were
drawn from the 2001 Italian General Census. The upper level set scan statistics
applied to a continuous response variable (Patil et al., 2006, Patil et al., 2007) was
used to successfully identifying poverty clusters. The implications and possibilities
for applications to digital governance are also discussed.
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Silvestro MONTRONE, Professore Ordinario di Statistica, Facoltà di Economia,
Università di Bari.
Massimo BILANCIA, Professore Associato di Statistica, Facoltà di Economia,
Università di Bari.
Paola PERCHINUNNO, Ricercatore di Statistica, Facoltà di Economia, Università di
Bari.