Rural Public Services

International Comparisons

Richard E Lonsdale, Gyorgy Enyedi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367286378
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000310467
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Interest in the special problems of rural areas and concern with rural development in general have increased substantially throughout much of the world in the years since about 1960. Attesting to this has been the dramatic increase in attention to rural problems in the scholarly and popular literature and by government agencies. At first the dominant focus was on development projects and the creation of new jobs. It was not long, however, until other related issues came to the fore, in particular the availability and quality of public services essential to achieve economic growth and improvement and having a direct bearing on the well-being of rural peoples. Most nations of the world have developed plans and launched pro-jects to improve rural public services and narrow urban-rural dif-ferentials in their provision. As one would expect, there have been great differences between nations in the severity of problems, foci of attention, program strategies and their general effectiveness, and degree of commitment and effort. Given this diversity, it seems ap-propriate to examine and compare rural service problems and efforts to ameliorate them in a sample of contrasting societies. Implicit is the conviction that (1) all nations can learn at least something from the experiences of others, and (2) by taking an international, com-parative view of the subject, certain generalizations can be established.

Part 1
Introductory Overview

1
Background and Scope of Study

Richard E. Lonsdale

György Enyedi

Rural areas worldwide experience a special set of problems in acquiring and maintaining such critical services as health care, education, telecommunications, public transportation, electric power, etc. The discrepancies between rural and more urbanized areas in the quantity, quality, and variety of services are almost everywhere to be seen. To be sure, such disparities are expected as the inevitable byproduct of the whole process of modernization and industrialization, wherein rural areas are generally cast in the role of the poorer, less-developed “peripheral” areas within nations, forever trying to play a “catch-up” game with more technologically advanced urban or “core” areas where capital, innovation, and political power are concentrated (Smith, 1983:310–15; Lonsdale and Avery, 198O).

About three-fifths of mankind can still be classified as rural (Population Reference Bureau, 1983), a fact easy to overlook in this urban-oriented world. The dominance of rurality is an outstanding characteristic of less-developed nations, many of which have immense populations (e.g., China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc.), and rurality is not a minor consideration in many advanced industrial nations (e.g., the share of the population classified as rural is 38 percent in the U.S.S.R., 26 percent in the U.S., 24 percent in Canada, 23 percent in the U.K., and 22 percent in Japan and France.

Rural areas throughout the world are generally at a disadvantage by virtue of their more dispersed populations, lower per-capita incomes, lower tax revenues, lower educational levels, higher fertility rates, more limited employment opportunities, and a weaker political voice in national governments. Such a position vis-à-vis urban areas need not be permanent, but it is particularly characteristic of societies striving for increased modernization and industrialization, which surely includes a good share of the world’s nations. Geographic inequality is an almost inevitable byproduct of the drive for industrialization, due in part to the tendency for capital and modern production to concentrate in the emerging urban centers. This has been true in both capitalist and socialist societies. The abolition of “antagonistic contradictions” between city and village has always been one of the cornerstones of the Marxist program for socialism. In some non-European socialist countries, there have been temporary anti-urban measures for reducing the rural-urban gap. Actually, extensive industrialization, as a first phase of socio-economic modernization of a socialist state, led everywhere to polarized regional development.

As societies attain a reasonably high level of industrialization, there emerge economic, social, and political forces which operate to reduce regional disparities through capital migration, improved interregional linkages, and central government policy (Williamson, 1965:8–10). Distinctions between rural and urban areas in economic well-being and service availability thus diminish in many essential respects, though there are always going to be differences in the range of services. The narrowing of urban-rural differences has been well-demonstrated in Europe and Anglo-America in recent decades.

Inequality in public service provision is particularly visible in Third World nations where a modern (usually Western-oriented) economy and life style have been superimposed on still-dominant traditional patterns. Inequality is pronounced between rural and urban areas, but it is also the rule within urban areas where much of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority of the population.¹ Some more modern services do filter down the urban heirarchy to regional centers, but higher-order services remain heavily concentrated in the likes of Cairo, Quito, Manila, and Managua where they are utilized largely by urban elites.

The service provision problems of rural areas can be viewed in both absolute and relative terms. In comparing nations, the absolute differences in service provision between industrial and Third World countries is of course immense, even though the provision of rural services may be a contentious issue in both categories of nations. Within nations, the relative discrepancy in public service provision (and other matters) between rural and urban areas can be substantial, particularly in Third World countries. In effect, poorer nations not only suffer low absolute levels of public service provision, but they also experience a greater relative disparity between their rural and urban spheres.

Contemporary evidence strongly indicates that poorer rural residents in both advanced and Third World nations are well aware of their disadvantaged position as regards many public services (Hewes, 1974:xiii). Thanks to the communications revolution which has brought television to many rural lands and the transistor radio to the most isolated corners of the earth, many rural residents have come to view their own quality of life as inferior to that of other (generally more urban) areas. Some migrate to the city, and others exert pressure on the government to provide public services more on par with those available in the city. In Third World areas, the rising aspirations and expectations of rural peoples can be satisfied only to a small extent, however, and as Hewes (1974:xiii) puts it, “out of this discontent political leaders fashion revolutionary appeals on the right and on the left,” and hostility toward urban-based elites is almost inevitably heightened.

Is the per capita cost of providing services higher in rural areas? It depends on local conditions and the services in question, and answers are not easy. For some public services it is higher in areas where the population density is low and where communities and/or individual dwelling units are far apart. This would seem to be clearest in the case of health care, electric power, education (especially secondary), postal service, public transportation, and telecommunications — assuming the provision of services at a level somewhere near that in more urbanized areas. In this case, the observation of Rainey and Rainey (1978:127–28) seems appropriate:

Public service costs are much like the costs of production. At very low levels of production, the costs are very high. If production levels are increased, the unit cost comes down until it reaches an optimum. Beyond this optimal level, congestion costs in the factory and the need for new equipment mean that unit costs go up again. There is evidence that the same is true of some public services. To give a full array of public services to a small, isolated rural community would be impossibly expensive.

However, the above reasoning may not be nearly as applicable in those rural areas where population densities are higher and where people live in compact villages rather than dispersed farmsteads. Also, one can argue that many public services are less expensive in rural areas, e.g. housing, corrections, police protection, public administration, waste disposal, water supply, and so on.² Furthermore, some services may not be in as much demand in rural areas or even perceived as a serious service need, e.g. waste disposal, animal control, child care, recreation, planning, libraries, etc. In the case of the United States, the highest per capita costs of electric power, police and fire protection, welfare programs, waste disposal, water supply, corrections, and court systems seem to be associated with larger cities, not rural areas. So one must be cautious in generalizing on rural-urban differentials in service delivery costs.

From the point-of-view of those providing services (e.g., government bodies), a most “efficient” system might be one where rural people have to travel farther to obtain services at fewer regional nodes, as opposed to maintaining a larger number of small facilities in all local areas (Broder, 1979; Dear, 1978). The needed scale economies could be achieved to minimize unit costs. However, there are powerful social arguments against such reasoning, based largely on the question of accessibility. There is the cost and inconvenience to the consumer, the element of urgency in the case of illness or an accident, and the likelihood of lower levels of service utilization by more distant consumers. Also, some services (e.g. electric power, telephone, roads) by their very nature must be extended to or near individual consumers if they are to be utilized to any significant extent.

The provision of public services generally requires some form of subsidization (i.e., financial support beyond direct user fees and local tax revenues), particularly in rural areas where income levels (and therefore taxation levels) are below those of more urbanized areas.³ Governments (and sometimes groups in the private sector) in effect support rural facilities out of the public treasury or out of revenues obtained from more profitable facilities. Some would point out that it is not easy to determine whether urban areas subsidize rural ones or vice versa (Linn, 1982). Historically, many cities have derived their wealth from the surrounding rural countryside, and this “parasitic” nature of cities is today abundantly evident in many Third World nations (Mabogunje, 1968; Harloe, 1977). In the private sector, government regulations may require servicing rural areas as a condition for a firm’s charter (e.g., public carriers in the U.S. before recent “deregulation” were obliged to serve certain areas, even where unprofitable). Whether such subsidies can be defended as economically rational or a proper expenditure of public funds is difficult to measure or assess, and they are increasingly being challenged (Lonsdale, 1981:282–83). In effect, there is a difficult question of equity for rural populations versus the cost involved, a matter treated at length by Massam and Askew in Chapter 2.

Defining Public Services

What is a public service? In order to discuss the subject, some sort of characterization is in order. Broadly speaking, services involve assisting or benefitting individuals through making useful things available to them, where the effort itself does not include the production of a good. The delivery of a good may be involved (e.g., water or natural gas), but most services deal with intangible commodities like health or education. A public service is something made available to the whole of the population, and it involves things which people cannot normally provide for themselves (i.e., people must act collectively). Dear (1978:94) sees public services as those involving “political decisions on public spending, in response to a social welfare criterion.” In this book the focus for the most part is on services to individuals rather than factories or businesses, although such services are certainly not mutually exclusive.

One simple but unsatisfactory approach is to define public services as all those provided in the public sector of the economy. They might be viewed as the services we receive from that portion of the gross national product spent by governments at all levels. However, the shortcomings in such a “government-only” definition are readily apparent when one considers, for example, health care, telecommunications, or airline service. Clearly, some services are partially or wholly provided by the private sector of the economy in many countries. The degree to which this is true of course varies from one nation to another, and one must keep in mind the not-always-so-obvious distinctions between capitalist, socialist, and mixed economies.

In nations with capitalist or mixed economies, it is appropriate to view public services as being co-supplied by both public and private sectors. As Lineberry (1980:368) puts it,

Very probably, no “public” service is performed wholly by the public sector. Almost any service (public health, public education, public safety, public recreation) has private sector counterparts. If we think of a public “function” being performed rather than merely a public service, then the functions of health, safety, recreation, and education are really performed by a mix of public and private institutions.

Public services almost always involve government, because assurance of their provision is seen as a government responsibility. This government involvement can mean direct ownership and service provision (city water supply, county hospitals, state parks, federal postal service) or it can mean dose public supervision and certification of privately operated facilities (local ambulance service, private hospitals, electric power systems, airlines). In either case, governments are acting in response to some welfare criterion, and there is a general consensus on the part of the population that government’s role is a necessary one. But public attitudes can change, as witness the process of “deregulation” of public transportation (i.e., privately owned airlines, trucking firms, etc.) now in progress in the U.S. Still, deregulation is not likely to be total, and in any event the services involved will likely continue to be seen as “public services.”

In the case of the socialist countries, of course, the bulk of the services are supplied by the public sector, subject to central planning. A limited private sector does exist, varying in size from one socialist nation to another. There is no exact definition of “public service” peculiar to socialist countries, but the concept tends to encompass approximately the same activities as in capitalist lands, but is more inclusive (embracing housing and often retail shops, for example, whose provision is not seen as a government responsibility in many capitalist countries)....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• PART ONE: INTRODUCTORY OVERVIEW
• PART TWO: THE EXPERIENCES OF ADVANCED CAPITALIST NATIONS
• PART THREE: THE EXPERIENCES OF SOCIALIST NATIONS
• PART FOUR: THE EXPERIENCES OF THIRD WORLD NATIONS
• PART FIVE: CONCLUSION
• About the Contributors
• Index