Rural areas still play a major role within the EU, as Europe is still a fairly rural continent. Moreover, EU rural areas are going through greater challenges and major transformations. After the Eastern enlargements of the EU (in 2004 and 2007), they are getting more and more heterogeneous, in...

This paper investigates the determinants of the productivity of independent retail stores in Sweden by focusing on the impact of market size and regional hierarchy while controlling for several store and employee characteristics over time. The analysis utilizes Swedish store-level data for the...

Most poor people in developing countries still live in rural areas and are primarily engaged in low productivity farming activities. Thus pathways out of poverty are likely to be strongly connected to productivity increases in the rural economy, whether they are realised in farming, rural...

Rapid urbanization is an important characteristic of African development and yet the structural transformation debate focuses on agriculture's relative merits without also considering the benefits from urban agglomeration. As a result, African governments are often provided conflicting...

This study documents the local transformation of rural Vietnamese communes in 12 different provinces from 2006 to 2014. Three key areas are considered, namely occupational and agricultural choice; provision of public goods and infrastructure as well as land markets. While many areas showed great...

This paper assesses the extent to which cooperation impacts innovation performance of firms in rural regions characterized by a solid economic performance despite a low-technology industrial structure. Particular emphasis is placed on the spatial and functional dimension of cooperation. Generic...

Some rural regions in Western Germany have experienced a very positive economic development in terms of employment and incomes in the past decade. This development, however, is in sharp contrast to the the enduring economic lag of many rural regions in Eastern Germany. This paper seeks to find...

This paper examines the role of rural regions in the economic transformation of Korea. The analysis at regional level reveals that, while having experiencing continued urbanisation and rapid demographic shift of aging and depopulation, the Korean rural areas performs well in terms of...