Accessibility and rurality indicators for regional development

The development of a region is affected, inter alia, by concepts linked to the ability to efficiently displace and reach other locations (accessibility) and to lagging economic conditions connected to contemporary countryside activities (rurality). These topics and their relationships have attracted the interest of scholars who have scrutinised the implications of accessibility and rurality for policy making and planning. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the theoretical modelling of accessibility and rurality and to develop an empirical study of their spatial patterns, with reference to the municipalities of the Region of Sardinia, Italy. We study accessibility through an indicator constructed by means of a double constrained spatial interaction model, and propose the Composite Index of Rurality that aims to evaluate rurality in a regional setting employing multivariate analysis. We investigate the spatial dependence of these indicators through general and local spatial autocorrelation analysis in order to verify the hypothesis that scarcely accessible spatial units are classifiable as rural areas.