  We use a minimum requirement approach to derive the number of jobs in
proximity services per inhabitant in French rural municipalities. We first
classify the municipalities according to their time distance to the
municipality where the inhabitants go the most frequently to get services
(called MFM). For each set corresponding to a range of time distance to MFM, we
perform a quantile regression estimating the minimum number of service jobs per
inhabitant, that we interpret as an estimation of the number of proximity jobs
per inhabitant. We observe that the minimum number of service jobs per
inhabitant is smaller in small municipalities. Moreover, for municipalities of
similar sizes, when the distance to the MFM increases, we find that the number
of jobs of proximity services per inhabitant increases.
