Rural Policy-Making and the Location of Public Facilities

Problems and a Method

Abstract

In this paper a new formal approach has been offered to assist in the comparison and selection of a policy for a rural region, given a set of feasible policies. The specific policy problem which is addressed concerns the selection of locations for a public facility (for example, a school or a health centre) given a set of feasible locations in a rural region. The good is only available at the chosen locations. The introduction to the paper provides a review on the role of quantitative evaluation in rural policy making. It is argued that a complete evaluation of a public location policy should include both public and private costs which are incurred in the provision and consumption of public goods and services. Comments on some recent social choice literature are offered.
The approach involves the analysis of an impact matrix using concordance and multi-dimension scaling techniques. The matrix contains information on the set of alternate locations and the impacts on a set of criteria. The criteria refer to equity and efficiency effects. The analysis allows a classification of the alternate locations, and by incorporating an ideal or hypothetical location into the initial matrix, the classification can be interpreted to identify the relative attractiveness of the locations. To illustrate this approach a hypothetical example is used. Given arural region and a set of five settlements, the problem is to identify the best set of three settlements to receive a public facility. The set of five is derived intuitively from a larger set of twenty settlements. For each location a set of seven criteria are used. The analysis indicates that, of the tenpolicies, two appear to be most satisfactory. For these policies the settlements which receive facilities are identified.
In conclusion it should be noted that this approach allows a variety of data to be included and a number of sensitivity analyses can be conducted. The purpose is to improve the quality of the debate among interested parties on the search for appropriate locations for public facilities in rural areas.