Systematic Literature Review on Rural Well-Being Measurement

While a substantial body of literature has been built on rural well-being (WB), the available literature is highly fragmented, even contradictory. The heterogeneity of rural territories explains part of the observed fragmentation, while researchers’ choices likely contribute to the rest. Moreover, no systematic review of the entire domain exists to guide rural decision-makers. The ongoing debate on conceptualization, contradicting results, and pressing policy requirements make it timely to deliver a systematized state-of-the-art on rural WB to anchor public policies in the rural development domain. By systematically reviewing the scholarly literature on rural WB, alongside a large number of documents developed by governmental and private entities signalled by academia as relevant to this subject, the review offered by this study provides a systematized state-of-the-art on what rural WB entails (what dimensions of WB matter to rural residents) and how rural WB is measured (which indicators). A bibliometric and thematic analysis without a time limit was adopted. The review uncovered 33 dimensions of rural WB unfolded across 9,000 indicators of rural WB. The study also mapped interconnections between dimensions and respective indicators and their relevance to international development goals. Hence, this study contributes with a comprehensive database on what rural WB is and how it is measured, which can be helpful to both researchers and policymakers. In addition, it provides an overview of each WB dimension by discussing the predominant theories, the main inconsistencies, the most relevant studies and authors, the insightful measurement frameworks, and the indicators used.