Factors of Environmental Sustainability in Italian Industrial Districts: A Composite Environmental Sustainability Index

This chapter joins the increasing set of studies on place-based factors of environmental strengths and weaknesses, looking in particular at industrial districts (IDs). According to the ID literature, the dynamics characterizing systems of specialized SMEs may embed in local societies and rest on sets of externalities and specific public goods. The work builds on those foundations and aims at progressing on methods for measuring environmental performances in IDs. It introduces a composite environmental sustainability index and applies it to a novel dataset collected in Italy at the municipality level. This application allows comparing IDs and other types of local systems’ environmental sustainability performances.