Economics Working Papers, 2026 (vol. 10), issue 4

Measuring regional sustainability in the EU: Developing and applying adjusted HDI variants with functional data analysis

Antonín Hořčica

Economics Working Papers 2026, 10(4):1-76 | DOI: 10.32725/ewp.2026.00292  

Addressing the gap in regional sustainability monitoring in the EU, this study assesses the applicability of composite sustainability indicator families at the NUTS 2 level and de-velops a methodology for regional variants of the Human Development Index (HDI) family. Nine indicator families were systematically assessed against four applicability criteria: communicability, relationship to GDP, sustainability dimension coverage, and territorial applicability. The HDI family emerged as the only methodologically sound basis for the NUTS 2 sustainability assessments. Four regional indices (R-HDI, R-IHDI, R-GDI, and the planetary pressures-adjusted R-PHDI)...