What do we owe a place? How the debate about left-behind places is challenging how we distribute public funding and the problems it should address

The debate around left-behind places challenges how we distribute public funding and what problems it should address. To inform this debate, this commentary calls greater transparency on the spatial distribution of public funding. It describes six benchmarks that can determine what we owe a place: autonomy, continuity, efficiency, input equality, output equality and anti-disparity. The first three benchmarks fail to consider left-behind places. Input equality ensures that left-behind places have the same public funding as other places, while output equality gives more funding to places where services are more costly to provide. Finally anti-disparity provides the most funding to left-behind places. The debate also expands the issues to be tackled. This commentary argues that addressing economic decline early can have both economic and political benefits. Slow population reductions are increasingly prevalent and should not be used to allocate more funding, while rapid and sustained reductions should be considered.

DIJKSTRA Lewis; 

2024-11-25

OXFORD UNIV PRESS

JRC137404

1752-1386 (online),   

https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsae010,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC137404,   

10.1093/cjres/rsae010 (online),