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...

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 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...

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...

Romania has the highest share of EU rural areas (44.9% ), which generates and maintains a long series of regional disparities. Because of these disparities, the economy faces a number of elements that undermine the quality of human and social capital and reduces the potential for growth:...

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...

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...

Over the past sixty years, most Asian countries have undergone relatively rapid agricultural transformations that helped jumpstart broader economic development. However, the changes have differed markedly in nature and speed across countries of the region. In much of East and Southeast Asia, the...

Developing countries have seen a rapid rise in population urbanization in the past decades. At the same time, they have participated actively in the process of globalization. However, possible interlinks between population urbanization and trade openness in developing economies have been ignored...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...