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Prevailing narratives versus reality of a small and medium town decline in a CEE country

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Abstract

It is a common narrative that small and medium towns of formerly socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are suffering a substantial decline due to better offerings in bigger metropolitan areas. Focused on Slovakia, this paper presents a methodology for assessing the future viability of small and medium towns, considering different socio-economic, infrastructural, and demographic aspects capturing their desirability. The proposed methodology aggregates different aspects into attributes by means of a data envelopment analysis model with common set of weights without explicit inputs (CSW DEA-WEI), and then converts these attributes into scores in the fashion of a multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA). The methodology offers a new perspective for rating the viability and sustainability of small and medium towns in the CEE region, and is amenable to adaptations elsewhere. Contrary to popular belief, it is found that small and medium towns remain attractive for life.

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Notes

  1. A treacherous road is classified as a section of the road that has the three following characteristics: a) steep grades, b) sharp curves (hairpin curves), c) roadways with narrow shoulders and sharp drop-offs. Treacherous roadway distances were calculated where the above characteristics dominated a particular section from a specific point A to a specific point B. Beyond these points, treacherousness is no longer calculated, even if they are the same road.

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Funding

This research is supported by VEGA [grant number 1/0786/18].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics, Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, Tajovského 10, 975 90, Banská Bystrica, Slovakia

    Martin Boďa, David Cole, Mária Murray Svidroňová  & Jolana Gubalová

  2. Faculty of Social and Economic Studies, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Pasteurova 1, 400 96, Ústí nad Labem, Czechia

    Martin Boďa

  3. Faculty of Natural Sciences, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Pasteurova 15, 400 96, Ústí nad Labem, Czechia

    Martin Boďa

  4. Faculty of Economics and Administration, Masaryk University in Brno, Lipová 41a, 602 00, Brno, Czechia

    Mária Murray Svidroňová

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Appendices

Appendix A

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Table 7 Factors employed in assessments of life attractiveness in municipalities
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7

Appendix B

Methodological details on the construction of evaluations

GPS coordinates for Slovak municipalities to construct inter-municipal distances and spatial weights were sourced from Wikipedia's Geohack database (see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GeoHack).

[PS] Population structure Economic dependency ratio is defined as the ratio of # persons aged 14 years at most and persons aged 65 years at least to # persons aged 15 to 64 years. This is a static indicator of population structure whose small value suggests that there are too many people in the pre-productive and post-productive age relative to economically active population. To turn it to maximization for municipality viability, it was inverted and its 2008 reciprocal values were employed. The other indicator, the rate of change in # persons aged 40 years at most to # persons aged more than 40 years, is a dynamic indicator of population structure. A value greater than 1 over a decade (or any longer period) indicates a tendency of the population to grow youthful and "rejuvenate". This indicator was employed without transformation, mapping the change between 2008 and 2018. The weights of the static and dynamic indicator in the composite index were determined by CSS WEI-DEA. No spatial averaging was employed for population structure is a factor of a specific place without discernible spatial spill-over effects.

[Un] Unemployment Since sufficiently detailed statistics at a municipal level are not available, registered job seekers are used as a proxy for unemployed persons. The transformation of this single metric evaluated for 2008 to the interval [0,1] recognized that smaller values are preferable as they indicate that local market conditions are conducive to job security. Given the ever-present labour mobility (especially of labour force from smaller to larger municipalities), this metric was spatially averaged.

[RC] Romany concentration The percentage concentration of the Romany population in municipalities estimated as of December 2010 was available from Matlovičová et al. (2012) in the form of unevenly spaced interval classes 0%, 0.1 − 1%, 1.1 − 5%, 5.1 − 10%, 10.1 − 20%, and so forth by 10 percentage points. Instead of these ordinal classes, their midpoints were used and transformed to the interval [0,1] with full regard given to the fact that smaller values are more acceptable for socially integrated inhabitants. The normalized values were spatially averaged to account for the fact that Slovaks are sensitive to locally concentrated clusters of the Romany population. Unfortunately, data on the Romany concentration could not be sourced from the Atlas of Roma communities in Slovakia 2019 provided by the Ministry of the Interior of the Slovak Republic (https://www.minv.sk/?atlas-romskych-komunit-2019) for too many municipalities reviewed in the present analysis are not covered in the publication.

[Rd] Roadways With respect to the spatial coverage of road networks in 2018, three distances were integrated into a single composite index by CSS DEA-WEI, i.e., the distance of a municipality to a 4-lane expressway, and the parts of this distance that must be driven on non-first-class and treacherous roads. Nonetheless, distances to a 4-lane expressway smaller than 5 km were treated as zeros since the expressway was in such cases within arm's reach. Values for each metric were turned into maximization by subtracting them from the maximum observed on that metric. This calculation was performed separately for each metric. Spatial averaging in this case would not make sense as distances of individual municipalities from the state's main transportation network do not impact one another.

[Sh] Shopping In the Banská Bystrica region, only district towns offer opportunities to do the shopping in malls or have large discount retailers residing in their territory. Therefore, these two metrics representing the shopping attribute were expressed relative to the travelling time in minutes to reach the district town plus a surcharge of 10 min for travelling across the district town. Accordingly, these metrics were defined as # of indoor and outdoor shopping malls or large discount retailers (Tesco, Lidl, Kaufland, Terno, Billa) divided by the travelling time to the district increased by 10 min. In consequence, district towns were by default penalized by a non-zero distance of 10 min, which is a reasonable (average) time to get to a nearby supermarket or mall in typical Slovak town. In order to account for cross-districtual shopping, which is a fairly frequent practice, the resulting composite indices resulting from CSS DEA-WEI were spatially averaged.

[HC] Health care The counts of different health care facilities in municipalities were integrated via CSS DEA-WEI into a composite index and spatially averaged in order to account for reachability and substitutability of health care services between different municipalities. Admittedly, this procedure is sort of rough since substitutability applies differently across the range of health-care facilities. Whereas pharmacies and medical aid supply points are nearly perfectly substitutable, substitutability of hospitals or specialized outpatient facilities is marginal at best.

[Sc] Schools Similarly as with [HC].

[Cu] Culture Similarly as with [HC].

Appendix C

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Table 8 Multi-attribute utilities for selected municipalities
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8.

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Boďa, M., Cole, D., Murray Svidroňová , M. et al. Prevailing narratives versus reality of a small and medium town decline in a CEE country. Oper Res Int J 22, 3113–3145 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12351-021-00651-4

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