RURAL-DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION

The paper sets out to create rurality indices for 222 non-urban Local Authority Districts (LADs) in England and Wales 1991, replicating the earlier work of Cloke (1977) and Cloke and Edwards (1986) for 1971 and 1981 respectively. The same technique is employed to generate the rur ality indices for 1931 as that used by those previous researchers. The results for 1991 ate then compared to those for 1981, illustrating th e robustness of the rurality index. Despite the robustness of the rura lity index, it was felt that too much of the variation in rurality was left unexplained by the previous construction. Therefore, principal c omponents analysis is used to identify two new dimensions of rurality: Structural Rurality and Demographic Rurality. The remainder of the pa per investigates the ways in which these new, or additional, indices o f rurality may prove useful to the further study of change in rural ar eas of England and Wales.