Deriving the number of jobs in proximity services from the number of inhabitants in French rural municipalities

We use a minimum requirement approach to derive the number of jobs of proximity services per inhabitant in a municipality from its number of inhabitants. We apply this approach to four different subsets of municipalities, each defined by a specific range of distance to the municipality where the inhabitants go the most frequently to get services (called MFM). For each subset, we get satisfactory results in regression. We observe that the minimum number of service jobs per inhabitant (interpreted as jobs of proximity services) is higher in the isolated municipalities (that are their own MFM) and lower in the municipalities located close to their MFM. When the distance to the MFM increases, we need that the number of jobs of proximity services per inhabitant fi rst increases and then reaches a plateau.