[Excerpt from authors]In many developing country settings, and particularly in rural areas, the implementation of anything more than very rudimentary contracts for medical care providers, including public employees, is virtually impossible. In this paper we examine the kinds of policy levers that governments might conceivably have available to induce physicians to serve in rural areas. Using simple models of screening and spatial competition we investigate how the government can sort between physicians with low and high opportunity costs of relocation, and how the quality of existing providers (e.g., traditional healers) might affect the government's training policies.