Cost-of-Living Differences between Rural and Urban Areas in Indiana: Examining the Real Prosperity of Rural Regions

The Index of Relative Rurality (IRR) provides a convenient scale for assessing how rural and urban areas differ in ways beyond their rurality. One such issue of interest to the present study is the general question of whether rural and non-rural areas differ with respect to the cost of living. Discussions of the economic competitiveness of rural regions often implicitly assume that residents of such areas tend to enjoy lower costs of living than their urban counterparts.