Abstract

Access to facilities and services is a key element in assessing the quality of life and territorial cohesion. This presentation is based on a map of facilities and services of general interest that was released by Statistics Portugal last year. We will try to understand how access to these facilities and services varies across different parts of Portugal. The analysis focuses on travel times, both on foot and by car, to a range of general interest facilities and services related to Education, Civil protection, Culture, and Health.
The results are based on quartile distributions, used as the reference statistic to examine variability regarding access times among the population and across different territorial contexts. This approach highlights disparities in accessibility and demonstrates the analytical value of these indicators in informing public policy and territorial planning.
The indicators presented form part of the Local and Interregional Asymmetry Indicators project (IAssLocal), which seeks to enhance the characterisation of socioeconomic diversity across territories.
The project takes advantage of the analytical potential of data from the National Data Infrastructure (NDI) built by Statistics Portugal, which contributes to a more nuanced understanding of spatial inequalities and access to essential services.
The National Data Infrastructure comprises multiple data sources, including information such as Population register, Buildings register and Business register, etc. One of these registers is the Facilities and Services register, which is built and updated in relation to other registers from the NDI. As such, these registers can be enriched with information from other sources, and serve different purposes and users, strengthening analytical capacity, enhancing flexibility in data management, and generating new microdata to support research.