What is Related to Towns’ Prospering and Decaying in Pennsylvania?

Abstract

This research aims to compare those degenerate towns and cities with booming ones to find out the strategies for rural and regional developments and help the decision-making through regional planning. Different from studies that only focus on decaying towns, this paper does not neglect those prosperous ones but compare the significant differences between them. The methods include 1) Principal Component Analysis (PCV) to create Development Index (DI) for every county subdivision from 2000 to 2015; and 2) spatial and temporal analysis to find whether some spatial patterns exist. Development Index (DI) is the core standard to evaluate some location’s development.