The access to broadband services as a strategy to retain population in the depopulated countryside in Spain

Fernando Merino, Maria Prats and Carlos-Javier Prieto-Sánchez

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to analyze at what extent the connectivity of small localities is a determinant of their demography. Specifically, we pay attention to three factors: the evolution of the population; the distance, measured both in kilometres and travel time, to the province capital, the usual city where the largest set of services is available; and finally, the coverage of different kinds of broadband services (from ADSL or 3.5 G to the fastest ones FTTH) in rural areas. An econometric model was estimated where the dependent variable captures the increase of inhabitants along 2017–2020 of the 5955 Spanish municipalities with a population between 101 and 10,000 inhabitants (73.3 % of all municipalities). The results point out to the following facts: digital connectivity of small localities is a determinant of their demography, whatever the technology used, but physical distance remains being a significant factor on the population growth (both if it is measured of physical distance or travelling time) to explain the population growth of each locality.

Keywords: internet connexions; broadband; sustainability; territorial cohesion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J10 R53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 7 pages
Date: 2024-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-ict and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Cities, 1, January, 2024, 144. ISSN: 0264-2751

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120866/ Open access version. (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:ehl:lserod:120866

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().