Introduction

Over the last five years the University of Siena’s Research Centre on Income Distribution “C. Dagum” and its research group have been awarded several research grants funded by international bodies such as the European Union, the World Bank and Eurostat. In particular, the SAMPLE project, funded by the EU under the seventh FP, is the main source of theory and results for this book (https://www.sample-project.eu/" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">www.sample-project.eu/). The reason that prompted us to put together this collective volume is that measures of poverty and inequality are most useful to policymakers and researchers when they are finely disaggregated, i.e. when they are estimated for small geographic units, such as cities, municipalities, districts or other “local” administrative partitions of a country. This book is the first attempt to bring together the most recent research results on local estimates of multidimensional poverty (deprivation).