Role of public services in maintaining the population of settlements

Regional competitiveness significantly influences the quality and accessibility of public service delivery.Research indicates that competition plays a pivotal role in shaping accessibility indicators, particularly spatial accessibility, which are critical for sectors such as transportation, urban planning and healthcare (Douthit et al. 2015, Guagliardo 2004, OECD 2021).The spatial distribution of public service facilities affects the quality of life of residents, and different degrees of agglomeration and accessibility are observed between different categories of facilities (McGrail et al. 2017).Moreover, the spatial impact of the availability of public services on house prices highlights the potential for greater clustering effects of public services (Diao et al. 2017).The availability of public service infrastructure also serves as an informative signal for citizens to assess political performance, influences political trust and potentially contributes to geographically polarised perceptions of quality (Christensen-Lægreid 2005).In this paper, the author undertakes a multivariate statistical analysis of the indicators mentioned above related to public services to investigate the impact of the qualitative characteristics of the indicators included in the analysis on the variation of population and demographic characteristics of municipalities.The results show strong positive correlations between the availability of educational, health and cultural public services and population retention.Areas with higher business incomes and well-developed public services tend to experience lower rates of out-migration.These findings underscore the importance of integrating economic and social development strategies to enhance rural demographic stability.