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.
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.
Past events
Related policy issues
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Many places in the OECD face declining and ageing populations. This trend will continue. 14 OECD countries are expecting to lose population by 2040. In some regions this trend will be lasting and strong, with some projected to lose 20% or more of their population by 2050. Strong population shrinkage brings challenges that are best addressed at the regional and local level. For example, the costs of services and infrastructure provision rise per person, while quality and access risks declining. Affected regions typically struggle with labour and skill shortages, deteriorating real estate values, eroding tax bases and vacant buildings. The effects vary across regions: while people often migrate from rural to urban regions, some cities and towns are also affected by population decline. Local policies, delivered with national support, are necessary to foster well-being, economic and environmental sustainability. They need to cover government finances, infrastructure and service provision as well as multilevel governance.Learn more
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The OECD Mining Regions and Cities Initiative is a platform for sharing good practices and policy advice to improve the economic, social, and environmental well-being of regions specialised in mining and mineral activities. Thematic areas of work include supporting value-added and diversification in mining economies, enhancing access to services and housing in mining towns, promoting economic participation of women and Indigenous peoples, and unlocking opportunities from the green and just transition. The initiative produces tailored case studies, global conferences, and a statistical toolbox to benchmark actions across regions. It aims to foster partnerships across governments, community-led initiatives, and private sector activities, including environmental, social, and governance (ESG) approaches.Learn more
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The OECD Principles on Rural Policy embody 20+ years of OECD work on rural development. They provide guidance for an integrated approach to urban-rural development, enhancing the sustainability and well-being of rural areas.Learn more
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Productivity and innovation underpin long-term economic growth and competitiveness of regions. They can help regions transition their economic structures and ensure sustainable wage growth for workers. Regions can follow different paths to unlock their potential, pushing the global knowledge frontier in some areas and focusing on uptake and diffusion of innovation in others. With effective governance, innovation policy can be a lever for place-based regional government. To help regions unlock their productivity and innovation potential, understanding the local drivers for productivity growth, the regional innovation system and its bottlenecks and the interplay with policies at different levels of government is key.Learn more
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Improving people's well-being requires sound evidence-based policies. We produce indicators for regions, cities and local areas in all areas of well-being. We promote international comparability, as well as the use of cutting-edge methods and new sources of data. Our network of experts advises on best practices for the production and use of high-quality statistics.Learn more