Measuring Social Capital: Official Statistics Initiatives in Italy

The aim of this paper is to present - after a review of the theoretical literature and the main international/national measurement experiences - the latest initiatives in measuring the Social capital (SC) in which the Italian National Statistical Institute (Istat) is involved. The first concerns the joint Istat - the Bank of Italy's attempt to produce a multidimensional measure, integrating data from different surveys. These main results have allowed us to overcome the traditional North-South representation of the Italian regions for the SC endowment. The second initiative refers to the National Council for Economics and Labour (NCEL) – Istat's Project on Fair and Sustainable Well-being and to the choice of indicators that monitor the well- being of the Italians regarding the Social relations domain. The last project is the Istat - Italian CSR Manager Network (CMN) initiative to create a bridge between what the firms report in their social reports and the social/environmental official indicators of the country. A standardization of social reports in fact could be beneficial to the development of new measures and studies on SC in the perspective of the sustainable well-being.