Abstract

Rural areas across Europe face are more likely to face population reductions and ageing. The contribution of service accessibility to demographic change remains poorly understood. This study investigates how access to public and private services shapes demographic change within functional rural areas (FRAs), a novel delineation of territories, using an analytical framework that combines decomposition, and joint conditional analysis. Drawing on harmonised European Census data for 2011 and 2021, matched with spatial indicators of service accessibility across education, healthcare, retail, and banking, we quantify the extent to which public and private service provision—along with local economic conditions, tourism, geography, and amenities such as weather—coincides with divergent demographic trajectories in functional rural areas and functional urban areas across the EU. The analysis proceeds in three stages: a demographic change analysis for all functional areas explained only by population characteristics, followed by a Gelbach decomposition isolating the contribution of each variable category to rural–urban differences in demographic outcomes; a similar exercise, with the indicators on service accessibility; and finally a joint analysis that explores a basket of services and minimum necessary conditions for demographic growth or relative resilience. Preliminary results suggest that better access to a variety of services is associated with more positive (or less negative) population change. The paper aims contributing to the EU's Long-term Vision for Rural Areas and to broader debates on territorial cohesion by providing actionable thresholds and place-sensitive policy insights for spatial investment prioritisation.