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Globalization has contributed to unprecedented economic growth but with some criticalities such as increasing inequality, growing environmental degradation, and uncertainty about the future of new generations. In order to remedy this difficult situation, over the years the United Nations (UN) have outlined several sustainable development goals (SDGs) to be achieved at the global level. Given the many facets of the international framework, it can be useful to assess national progress by paying attention to the regional specificities. The Italian case is particularly delicate, since it is characterized by a large gap between the North-Center regions – among the most developed in Europe – and the South – with an economy mainly based on agriculture. Our work aims at quantifying the sustainable development level achieved by the Italian regions. Starting from the theoretical framework of Salvati and Carlucci, we build a composite index to measure the regional sustainable development performance. The method adopted to construct the index is the Pena's distance (DP2). The results confirm the existence of a gap, splitting the country into two parts. The regions of the North and Center-North stand out as the most virtuous, while the Southern regions show a state of backwardness in achieving the SDGs. In addition, we find that where the sustainable development levels are higher, there are higher levels of gross domestic product per capita and less inequality.

The COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to causing a very serious economic crisis, has slowed the path taken toward achieving gender equality. For example, the closure of third sector activities by governments has meant the loss of many jobs in this female-dominated sector (ILO, 2020; UN, 2020) slowing and hindering the professional careers of many women (Carli, 2020).

The objective of this work is to identify gender differences by analyzing the levels of sustainable development achieved by Italian regions. The Italian case in fact is very peculiar due to its historical territorial gap between the regions of the North (among the most developed) and those of the Center-South, which still show high gender inequalities. A Gender Sustainable Development Index (GSDI) will be constructed through the use of 50 indicators from the Benessere Equo e Sostenibile survey of Istat. The technique used is the stacking method (Landi, Ivaldi, & Testi, 2017; Norman, 2010), which was chosen for its high replicability of results. The results show that only 40% of Italian regions have higher levels of female sustainable development than male sustainable development. Moreover, the regions with the worst levels of both female and male sustainable development are located in the Center-South of the country, confirming the strong territorial gap present within the Italian Peninsula.