Developing a taxonomy framework for assessing human capital provision: A case study of Southern Italian municipalities

The decline of rural areas emerges as a central aspect of European and national policies. Decline manifests itself in distinct forms, resulting from the interaction among exogenous and local factors. Understanding the different socio-economic trends and tangible and intangible conditions of rural areas, defined as the intra-rural divide, is central to the definition of priorities of public policies. Within this framework, the proposed study focuses on the notion of Territorial Capital (TC) with a particular focus on Human Capital (HC) as a conceptual frame for investigating the intra-rural divide. Different unsupervised learning methods have been employed to identify clusters of similar administrative units in terms of HC provision using a set of 12 input indicators, enabling a deeper understanding of the intra-rural divide. The study area consists of six southern Italian regions, specifically chosen due to their pronounced disparities. The present work contributes to the discipline of regional and urban studies by developing a novel taxonomy framework specifically for assessing HC disparities at a detailed local level, thereby making the concept of the intra-rural divide measurable and analyzable and enabling the definition of targeted policies respondent to individual areas’ needs.