Regional Research Project NE-47 is producing a series of studies dealing with the determinants and consequences of various population trends and changes in Connecticut and the Northeast. One of the overall objectives of this project was specified as the development, at the regional level, of a set of economic, social, and demographic data to provide a background against which individual community studies could be analyzed and interpreted. The study described in this report was undertaken in order to examine the social and economic consequences of population decline within the Northeast. It was hypothesized that among rural areas losing population the socioeconomic characteristics of the population would vary inversely with the extent to which out-migration was balanced by an excessive of births over deaths. Seventy-six rural counties were divided into 4 groups on the basis of their ratios of total population loss to migration loss. The 4 groups were then compared in terms of their average standing with respect to several demographic and socioeconomic variables. Results indicated (1) that there is little, if any, systematic variation among the county groupings with respect to the demographic characteristics of their population with the exception of age, and (2) that the socioeconomic characteristics of the population vary inversely with the extent to which out-migration is balanced by natural increase. (JH)