Vanda Almeida (p), Claire Hoffmann, Sebastian Königs, Ana Moreno-Monroy, Mauricio Salazar-Lozada, Javier Terrero-Davila

Alessandra Michelangeli

People’s ability to access essential services is key to their labour market and social inclusion. An important dimension of accessibility is physical accessibility, but little cross-country evidence exists on how close people live to the services facilities they need, for lack of data. This paper helps to address this gap, focusing on three types of essential services: Public Employment Services, primary schools and Early Childhood Education and Care. It collects and maps data on the geographic location of these services for several OECD countries and links them with data on regional population and transport infrastructure. This allows to compute travel times to the nearest service facility and to quantify disparities in accessibility at the regional level. The analysis is done at the level of small (TL3) regions and considers two possible transport modes, walking and driving. The results highlight substantial inequalities in accessibility of essential services across and within countries. Although large parts of the population can easily reach these services in most countries, some people are relatively underserved, facing high travel times to the nearest service facility. This is particularly the case in non-metropolitan and low-income regions, although there can exist significant dispersion in travel times for regions with the same level of access to cities. Lack of access to a motor vehicle can crucially undermine service accessibility for some people, in the absence of public transport, as walking times can be too long in a number of regions. At the same time, accessibility seems to be associated with the potential demand for these services, once accounting for other regional economic and demographic characteristics.

Alessandra Michelangeli (p), Umut Türk

Vanda Almeida

This paper investigates inequality in infrastructure for health across neighborhoods in the city of Milan. Neighborhoods provide the immediate environment where people live, work and play, and for many more vulnerable groups, such as older people and those with low income, most of their lives are spent in the neighbourhood. The aim is to assess whether some categories of the population, such as the elderly, have a difficult access to health care because of distance.
We utilize data from open map services to gather information on the locations of residential buildings and health amenities within city. Employing geographical information systems, we generate an accessibility index for health amenities, including hospitals, pharmacies, and doctors, based on the data from each residential building. Subsequently, for each neighbourhood, we compute the inequality in accessibility to health services.
Our findings reveal that inequalities in access to healthcare contributes substantially to magnify socioeconomic disparities. In some neighborhoods, social segregation coexists with a poor endowment of health infrastructures.