The Well-Being of Rural Population

Abstract

Heterogeneous, overlapping rural worlds coexist with variable degrees of visibility and well-being in Argentina. The structural particularities of the houses, the styles of settlement of the population (dispersed or grouped) and the present and past productive systems have left their marks in the current rural territory. The distribution and possibility of access to diverse facilities (drinking water, sanitation, electricity, communications, etc.) evidence convergent territorial configurations. Within them, there are manifestations of power confrontations and the centrality of certain actors who, though transformed and camouflaged throughout historical development, are always present in the dynamics of the rural territory. Demographic dynamics is also relevant in the analysis of these rural worlds, since from the mid-twentieth century, census data show a continuous decline in rural population in each measurement, according to volume and also to proportion, especially of those that live dispersedly. Overall, the inhabitants of rural Argentina have been considered mere economic actors, being their social, sanitation, educational and communication deficiencies made somehow invisible. In other words, the productivity approach or influence of agricultural production on national income has prevailed from a macroeconomic perspective, and, in general, there have been little observation of the living conditions of rural people. In this sense, this chapter aims to show the territorial inequalities of Argentine rural population in relation to their well-being, based on the implementation of a synthetic measurement called the Argentine Rural Welfare Index (ARWI). The contribution of this index lies in the possibility of knowing and appreciating the levels of satisfaction with respect to fundamental dimensions to the development of rural population life at the highest level of disaggregation of the spatial information currently available, census radii. The ARWI contributes to realizing that, in comparative terms, rural inhabitants of the Pampean area do not always enjoy greater objective well-being than the inhabitants of the Cuyo, Patagonia and Northern areas.

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