Measuring Rural Social Well-Being with Official Indicators: Regional Growth, Public Spending and Subnational Conversion Gaps in Kazakhstan

Rural development policy increasingly relies on indicators, yet whether composite measures of rural well-being are coherent or whether regional growth reaches rural residents are rarely tested. Using official statistics for 14 oblasts of Kazakhstan over 2018–2024, we build a Rural Social Well-Being Index from five rural-specific indicators: poverty, infant mortality, housing, employment and preschool enrolment. The dimensions are weakly related, so a dashboard of separate indicators is more informative than is a single score. We distinguish within-oblast associations, which describe change over time inside an oblast, from between-oblast differences, which compare richer and poorer oblasts. Within oblasts, two-way fixed-effects models with wild cluster bootstrap inference suggest that a 10% higher real gross regional product is associated with about 1.1 percentage points lower rural poverty, but this association does not survive multiple-testing correction, and we find no evidence of links with other rural outcomes or local public spending. Between oblasts, richer oblasts are not found to have lower rural poverty. A Rural Conversion Gap, defined as the deviation of rural poverty from the level predicted by economic capacity, consistently ranks oblasts, although no oblast is a statistical outlier. The estimates are associations, not causal effects.