The Non-Market Benefits Of Rural Service Provision

Alistair McVittie, Dominic Moran and Clare Hall

No 7977, 81st Annual Conference, April 2-4, 2007, Reading University, UK from Agricultural Economics Society

Abstract: The provision of services in rural areas is constrained by a number of issues arising from the remoteness of such areas and the relative sparsity of rural populations. These factors combine to increase the cost of supply and reduce the demand for services, which consequently threatens the viability of service provision whether by the public or private sectors. A possible to solution to these issues lies in the co-location of rural services, which in general means that two or more distinct services are located within the same premises thus reducing the delivery costs associated with one or more of these services. Beyond the simple economics of service provision lies the existence of non-market elements of services in terms of benefits to local communities of service provision that might arise from the social elements of local provided services such as community cohesion. This paper applies non-market valuation to quantify these benefits in three case studies across Scotland. The results indicate that relative degree of these benefits can be related to the remoteness of rural communities in that more remote communities particularly value the community aspects of services whereas less remote communities are more resistant to increased distances to access services. More generally, the results provide evidence on the inherent trade-offs between factors such as opening hours, levels of service and distance that can be used in determining the optimal configuration of service provision.

Keywords: Community/Rural/Urban Development; Public Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/7977/files/cp07mc01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aes007:7977

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.7977

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 81st Annual Conference, April 2-4, 2007, Reading University, UK from Agricultural Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().