RT Journal Article
T1 Proposal for a sustainable development index for rural municipalitie
A1 López Penabad, Celia
A1 Iglesias Casal, Ana
A1 Rey-Ares, Lucía
K1 Sustainable rural development
K1 Galicia
K1 Spain
K1 DEA
K1 Depopulation
K1 Economy
AB Depopulation is a major challenge for many rural inland areas, as is the case in a considerable number of rural municipalities in Galicia (north-western Spain). The pandemic had a considerable impact on internal migration in 2020, but it was far from being anywhere near high enough to reverse the ongoing trend of population decline, highlighting the need for further action. Thus, this paper has a twofold objective: firstly, to propose an index of rural sustainable development for the rural Galician municipalities, and secondly, to identify the factors related to it. In so doing, a composite index stemming from the Benefit of the Doubt methodology has been proposed in the first stage, an index built from four-dimension factors– economic, demographic, social, and environmental. The empirical evidence of this index has been compared with three additional ones (namely, common weights, super-efficiency, and geometric mean and logistic normalization models). In the second stage, the relationship between the composite index and a set of exogenous variables that affect rural development has been analyzed, the data confirming that the rates of female immigration and occupancy in the hospitality sector favors sustainable development, whereas the distance from the provincial capital hinders it. This paper paves the way for an assessment of the potentialities of each territory, and the evidence found allows actions to be supported that generate sustainable progress in rural Galician municipalities and that are useful for tackling this complex problem.
PB Elsevier
YR 2022
FD 2022
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/29070
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/29070
LA eng
NO Journal of Cleaner Production 357 (2022) 131876
NO This work has been supported by the FEDER/Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [Ref.: RTI2018-099804-A-100] within the framework of the research project “Legal instruments for the fight against depopulation in rural areas (DESPORU)”
DS Minerva
RD 24 abr 2026