The challenges of population decline, and ageing highlight the need for effective public service provision, ensuring accessibility, especially in rural and remote areas. These regions face higher costs due to sparse populations, lower economies of scale and increased transportation costs, making it difficult to attract and retain professionals like teachers and doctors. The OECD offers policy solutions and reliable estimates of current and future costs, and access arising from demographic and geographical differences.
Rural service delivery
Ensuring universal access to essential services like healthcare and education to all residents, regardless of location, is a core mandate for OECD countries. However, tight budgets and changing demographics, such as depopulation and ageing societies, make this increasingly challenging. Service provision is particularly difficult in rural areas due to increased costs in remote locations.
The OECD provides data, best practices, and tools to help policymakers adopt integrated, flexible, and sustainable solutions for service delivery in rural areas.
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Key messages
The OECD looks at how different-sized towns and villages contribute to regional development. The size of a place and its access to a city affect the services it offers. Access to a city also matters for growth: towns near cities grew more in the last decade, while remote ones grew less.
In rural areas, the number of students is decreasing and will likely continue to do so in the future. This makes providing education in these areas more expensive, which adds to difficulties in attracting teachers and principals. As governments are mandated to provide basic education to all children, regardless of their location, finding sustainable strategies for schooling in areas with shrinking populations is important, especially with limited budgets.
Rural proofing is a tool to help policy makers develop more nuanced rural friendly policies, making them fit for purpose in rural areas. It involves making policy decisions based on evidence on rural dynamics available in a timely fashion to enable changes and adjustments early in the policy design phase. Governments should consider rural proofing heath sector policies and strategies to ensure that rural communities have access to health services and are equipped to develop new ways to address health care needs.
Context
Annual cost per primary school student (estimated) by country and degree of urbanisation, EU27+UK
In small towns and rural areas, primary school costs per student are higher, but they go down in cities.
Share of users far from cardiology services in sparse rural areas in 2011 and 2035 (%)
By 2035, more cardiology services will be available, making it easier for people to access them as the demand increases.
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