The importance of nonprofit organizations such as rural development organizations, farmers associations and common initiative groups as drivers of change in rural areas has been generally recognized in the economics of nonprofit organizations. While the economic theories attempt to explain the...

A fuzzy logic model for quantifying farm households’ potential for non-farm income diversification is developed and applied to 1,077 farm households in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia. About three quarters of households have a diversification potential, but not all households...

We investigate how the perception for wide-spread bribing culture affects rural non-farm startup plans in transition. The study contributes to the literature on rural entrepreneurship and the role of institutional factors as drivers of entrepreneurial decisions. Using primary farm household data...

Rural non-farm employment (RNFE) is thought to ease poverty, economic vulnerability and income inequality. Two key questions arise: (1) Do alternative income sources actually help to raise the welfare of small family farms? (2) How is the rural regional income distribution affected by mixed...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

Increasing occurrence of devastating natural shocks has stimulated research interest in the economics of natural disasters. Much of this scholarly work concentrates on effects of shocks on poverty, risk and vulnerability, and very little on understanding the effects of natural shocks on risk...

Semi-subsistence farm households (SFHs) have persevered in Central and Southeastern Europe. An outlook on future perspectives of SFHs asks for reliable information on the phenomenon of SFHs and the impact of policy measures on their development options: (1) intensifying farming, (2) diversifying...

Although interest in the structure and relational features of social capital and its underlying networks has grown since the early 1990s, the terms do not embody any ideas that are really new to sociologists, but are indeed rather new to economists. Until the 1950s, land, labour, and financial...

Croatia is very close to meeting the requirements necessary for becoming a member of the European Union (EU). On February 6, 2008, the European Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said that accession negotiations with Croatia are moving ahead well. As in all new member states (NMS), the...

Everybody knows: rural regions offer fewer possibilities for non-farm employment than urban areas. For this reason, it was the semi-subsistence farm structures that had to absorb the released workers from the big rural state enterprises and the urban-rural migrants fleeing unemployment in the...