Evaluation and modeling of factors affecting the distribution of public services in rural areas with a rural development approach (Case study: settlements of Takab city)

The rational and equitable distribution of public services in rural areas has been the subject of numerous studies. A fair distribution can facilitate rural development.While not benefiting from public services or its uneven and clustered distribution in the settlements, can be considered an obstacle to rural development. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the status of public service distribution in rural areas of Takab city and the factors affecting it. This research is a descriptive-analytical research and the required information has been obtained from the identity card of the city's settlements by the Statistics Center of Iran (2011). Spatial statistics and ArcGIS software have been used to analyze the data. The analyzes used included: IDW zoning method, Moran spatial autocorrelation, Hotspot analysis and Geographically weighted regression (GWR). The results showed that the distribution of public services in the settlements of the city was not the same. This non-uniformity has also been in terms of the type of public services, and for example, despite the fact that most of the settlements benefit from water, electricity and gas services, they have had very few cultural- sports services. On the other hand, there are spatial differences in the distribution of services. Public services have a spatial autocorrelation and are scattered in clusters throughout the city. In this way, clusters with high values ​​are more visible in the levels of Ahmadabad and Ansar villages and low values ​​are formed in the levels of Chaman, Karfto and Sarough villages. The results of geographically weighted regression analysis showed that the model used to explain the factors affecting the distribution of public services in the city, was able to explain 78.8% of the changes in the dependent variable.