Over the years, the quest for a better society has led to the birth of a variety of composite indices of development, from the gross domestic product to the happiness index. These indices usually integrate various social, cultural, psychological, and political aspects and are considered of vital importance for evaluating a country's level of development and for assessing the impact of policy specially in public sector. Overall, they consist of numerical measures that describe the well-being of both the individual and the society as a whole. 

The Special Issue of Socio-Economic Planning Sciences encourages original research articles of high quality that provide innovative quantitative and qualitative methodologies based on optimization/non-optimization, statistical learning, econometrics, and heuristics.