Measuring socio-economic deprivation at sub-municipal level through the integration of census and administrative data

The integration of permanent population and housing census data with administrative sources offers an exceptional opportunity to produce detailed indicators of demographic, social, and economic phenomena down to the sub-municipal level. This approach, which combines accurate, timely, renewable, and geocoded data, enables in-depth analysis of key phenomena and allows for tracking their evolution across time and space. The Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) has recently launched a project to measure socio-economic deprivation at the sub-municipal level. Leveraging existing databases, a series of individual indicators were developed to assess deprivation across four dimensions: economic status, employment, education, and housing. These indicators are synthesized into the Socio-Economic Deprivation Index of population (SED-Index), calculated at the enumeration area level. The availability of data at this level provides significant potential for analysis and supports policymakers in identifying areas with higher socio-economic deprivation within municipalities.