@inbook {817, title = {Going Beyond GDP to Nowcast Well-Being Using Retail Market Data}, booktitle = {Advances in Network Science}, year = {2016}, pages = {29{\textendash}42}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, organization = {Springer International Publishing}, abstract = {One of the most used measures of the economic health of a nation is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP): the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. GDP, prosperity and well-being of the citizens of a country have been shown to be highly correlated. However, GDP is an imperfect measure in many respects. GDP usually takes a lot of time to be estimated and arguably the well-being of the people is not quantifiable simply by the market value of the products available to them. In this paper we use a quantification of the average sophistication of satisfied needs of a population as an alternative to GDP. We show that this quantification can be calculated more easily than GDP and it is a very promising predictor of the GDP value, anticipating its estimation by six months. The measure is arguably a more multifaceted evaluation of the well-being of the population, as it tells us more about how people are satisfying their needs. Our study is based on a large dataset of retail micro transactions happening across the Italian territory.}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-28361-6_3}, author = {Riccardo Guidotti and Michele Coscia and Dino Pedreschi and Diego Pennacchioli} }