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Depopulation is a major challenge for many rural inland areas, as is the case in a considerable number of rural municipalities in Galicia (north-western Spain). The pandemic had a considerable impact on internal migration in 2020, but it was far from being anywhere near high enough to reverse the ongoing trend of population decline, highlighting the need for further action. Thus, this paper has a twofold objective: firstly, to propose an index of rural sustainable development for the rural Galician municipalities, and secondly, to identify the factors related to it. In so doing, a composite index stemming from the Benefit of the Doubt methodology has been proposed in the first stage, an index built from four-dimension factors– economic, demographic, social, and environmental. The empirical evidence of this index has been compared with three additional ones (namely, common weights, super-efficiency, and geometric mean and logistic normalization models). In the second stage, the relationship between the composite index and a set of exogenous variables that affect rural development has been analyzed, the data confirming that the rates of female immigration and occupancy in the hospitality sector favors sustainable development, whereas the distance from the provincial capital hinders it. This paper paves the way for an assessment of the potentialities of each territory, and the evidence found allows actions to be supported that generate sustainable progress in rural Galician municipalities and that are useful for tackling this complex problem. • A new rural sustainable development index based on four dimensions is proposed. • Strengths and weaknesses for each Galician rural municipality are identified. • Environmental factors constitute a driver of rural development in Galicia. • Social aspects (i.e., health, education, services) stand out as main weaknesses. • Policies to boost social care and attract childbearing-age inhabitants are paramount. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to link the literatures on economic complexity, income equality and environmental quality within the context of the Environmental Kuznets Trilemma. Within this framework, it is possible to measure the presence of an impossible trinity of irreconcilable objectives: economic growth, equal distribution of income and environmental sustainability. Our paper revisits this trilemma by focusing on economic complexity (EC) indexes instead of direct measures of economic growth, and applies this analysis to the sub-national level. We link these three cutting-edge topics by means of novel datasets computed for the Spanish economy at the province level (NUTS-3) for a long period (2002–16). Our paper also sheds new light on the spatial patterns of the trilemma's three dimensions and their implications for the future of Spain's more peripheral regions. ⁃ This paper links the literatures on economic complexity, income equality and environmental quality within the context of the Environmental Kuznets Trilemma. ⁃ Our paper focuses on economic complexity indexes instead of direct measures of economic growth, and applies this analysis to the sub-national level, using novel datasets for the Spanish provinces (NUTS-3) for a long period (2002–16). ⁃ Our paper shows a clear tension between economic growth and complexity versus income equality and environmental quality. The econometric analysis verifies the classic trilemma (equality-sustainability-growth), but also of our new version: equality-sustainability-complexity. ⁃ The paper also tests the presence of a quadrilemma, discussing the role to which a province's level of complexity tends to play in the tensions between growth, inequality, and sustainability. The results open new avenues for the smart specialization of regions within countries, something specially relevant in the COVID-19 crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]