01694nas a2200157   4500008004100000245006800041210006700109260003800176300001200214520112100226100002301347700002001370700002001390700002401410856010201434       2016                        eng d00aGoing Beyond GDP to Nowcast Well-Being Using Retail Market Data0 aGoing Beyond GDP to Nowcast WellBeing Using Retail Market Data  bSpringer International Publishing  a29–423 aOne 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.1 aGuidotti, Riccardo1 aCoscia, Michele1 aPedreschi, Dino1 aPennacchioli, Diego  uhttps://kdd.isti.cnr.it/publications/going-beyond-gdp-nowcast-well-being-using-retail-market-data