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Description
The sustainability of rural economies requires a healthy population structure and local availability of necessary skills. This
can be achieved by retaining the current population and attracting new dwellers. Accordingly, the Scottish Government’s
National Population Strategy aims to promote “a population [that] is more balanced and distributed across Scotland.”
While often desirable from the naturalistic point of view, rural, island and remote locations are generally characterised
by lower accessibility to keystone services, forcing people to make difficulttrade-offs. Therefore, we investigate Scottish
residents’ willingness to move (or not) to places that differ in terms of their natural environment, and service accessibility.
Our results allow us to draw conclusions on what is needed to attract different demographics to such places.