Does Shrinking Population in Small Towns Equal Economic and Social Decline? A Romanian Perspective

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for inviting me to review the paper “Does shrinking population in small towns equal economic and social decline? Perspectives from a developing country.” This paper addresses an important topic that has potential. In its current form, there are many details that are underdeveloped for an international reader. I encourage the authors to continue to develop the paper for publication.

 

Overall, the paper is nicely written. However, certain sections of the paper appear to be written by different people. The abstract is nicely and clearly written. The literature review and the discussion are also clearly and well written. However, the language contained in the results section is more awkward and unclear. For example, the authors write “towns are located near the county seats”. I’m not sure what county seats represent? Is this the county capital? Is this the regional centre?

 

The author(s) will want to review some of the assertions in their paper. For example, they suggest that “depopulation leads to increase local government spending and under-utilization of the existing infrastructure”. While I agree it can lead to underutilized infrastructure, there is ample evidence and literature to suggest that depopulation leads to a decline in local government spending as small local governments cut costs, personnel, etc. which undermines their capacity for renewal. The authors also suggest that the small towns have been impacted by a communist regime that has focused only on the industrialization of these places, with little attention paid to urban infrastructure. However, this is equally the case for small towns in peripheral regions in capitalist countries such as Australia, Canada, the US, and beyond as small towns are treated like “resource banks” where rural regions see little benefit for the resources that are extracted.

 

The research design needs more clarity. For example, I’m not sure if “own income to the local budget per capita” stems from general revenues for a local government or revenue from a municipal enterprise, etc. What does that “own income” represent or come from? The authors need a better justification for their selection of indicators. I’m not sure that these are the best indicators. There is a good body of work by Cabaleiro et al. (2012), Navarro-Galera et al. (2016), Locke (2011) etc. that examines indicators to reflect the fiscal health of municipalities. Why choose share of modernized streets vs. relationship between revenues and expenditures or total assets? These may be influenced by the data available and collected for small towns in Romania. This can vary a lot from one country to the next, but the international reader will not know. This section should recognize the indicators used in the international literature and perhaps offer a critical reflection of what is available to them for small towns in Romania.

 

I’m not convinced that the paper has delivered clear evidence for an international reader to decide whether population decline equals economic and social decline. There are many case studies in Australia, Canada, and beyond where small towns are declining, even though their economies are booming due to the expansion of liquified natural gas or coal seam gas developments where industries are relying on the use and influx of mobile workers living in camps. I understand the context is different perhaps for Romania. But we need to see better / clearer evidence of employment statistics or data about what is happening in these places.

 

I like the four types of towns they have identified. I think there is potential there. But we need a more detailed description of the characteristics that distinguishes each town type. Stating economic and social progress has been slow is too vague and general to be useful to the international reader. It is way too cursory.

 

Could the authors generate a new Table 1 that includes these categories, but that also includes the range in index values contained within each category. The authors should also use a period instead of commas for the percentages in this table (i.e. 32.56 and not 32,56).

 

The maps look very nice. But do the dots represent the index scores, population size, or something else? Some resilient towns have bigger dots than sustainable growing towns – so it seems that it is not representative of index score?

 

When we get to page 8 out of 16, there are some peculiar statements. The authors note that “small towns may experience reduced economic activity caused by lack of investments and employment opportunities”. Why use the word “may”? Are they not sure? Surely the indicators would contain measures about employment numbers? We need more direct reflections with the measures they used here.

 

As they explore issues in the discussion, it would be helpful to reflect on the range of index values for each category (i.e. sustainable towns with index scores between X and X; resilient towns with index scores between X and X, etc.).

 

There is some good discussion in the final section. I appreciated the discussion on proper technical infrastructure. But it is general and does not reflect on the differences between sustainable and resilient towns. So the authors need to carry their framework throughout the discussion.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Overall, the paper is nicely written. However, certain sections of the paper appear to be written by different people. The abstract is nicely and clearly written. The literature review and the discussion are also clearly and well written. However, the language contained in the results section is more awkward and unclear. For example, the authors write “towns are located near the county seats”. I’m not sure what county seats represent? Is this the county capital? Is this the regional centre?

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your time and valuable comments. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

For me this is a mildly interesting contribution to the international literature on the small towns and population shrinkage. The analytical research is quite novel in its own way and looks like it provides new intelligence on what is happening to the urban system in Romania, which can be compared with other countries. But I would liked to see more detail about the variables that went into composite index as well as more detail about the method of forecasting through to 2031.

As regards the drafting of the paper, the overall structure is fine, but I would like to have seen a closer linkage between the text and the illustrative material, i.e. doing more to explain what is shown in the Figures. Perhaps starting with Figure 1: what are ‘towns with villages under 10 inhabitants’? The authors have tried hard with their English, but the result is only moderately good. The first main problem section is lines 72-85 and I am particularly intrigued to know what is meant by ‘de-industrialization in non-competitive sports’ (line 79). Even the title is somewhat strange: (1) Surely most countries are ‘developing’ if Romania is – the word just means ‘evolving’ unless it is meant to classify it as a member of the Global South; (2) More attention in the commentary seems to be given to economic rather than to ‘social’ decline, though I am not sure what the latter is - is the composite index evenly balanced between economic and social variables?

Comments on the Quality of English Language

As indicated above, moderate editing of English language required. Presumably you are not expecting me to copy edit the whole paper for you?

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for your time and valuable recommendations. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf