TABLE OF CONTENTS: Preface; Gertrud Buchenrieder and Tom Dufhues. Issues and evidence of social networks in boosting rural households' welfare; Gertrud Buchenrieder. Open issues and implications for measuring individual social capital in developing countries; Tom Dufhues and Gertrud Buchenrieder. What...

During the transition of the Vietnamese economy, adaptation of the financialsystem was one of the most challenging reforms. A major task of this reformwas to expand the financial system?s outreach to the newly emerging privatesector and household economies, especially in rural areas. Therefore,...

The rural out-migration of young people leads to problems such as “brain drain” and the overageing of the rural population. The purpose of this paper is to study return migration motives among students originating from rural areas. The case study relates to the province of Akmola, northern...

While the rural exodus dominates public and scientific debates, considerably less attention has been given to studying why the overwhelming majority of people worldwide remain immobile. As a consequence of this, the reasons why people stay, especially in economically weaker rural areas, are...

Purpose: Ethical consumption is on the rise amidst concerns about the environmental and health impacts of industrial agriculture. In light of increasingly complex food choices, alternative food networks have emerged. However, their success depends on a deeper understanding of the product...

Producer organisations bear great potential to link small-scale farmers to markets. In post-communist economies, historically negative attitudes towards cooperatives are blamed as barriers to collaboration, but little is known about the broader range of motives to (not) cooperate. We use a...

Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that an individual’s position in an income stratum—more than the absolute income level—determines subjective well-being. However, studies on subjective well-being suffer from a critical methodological weakness: they use exogenously defined...

This article addresses one of the key challenges facing transitional and emerging economies: managing rural–urban migration to tackle rural decline and the associated rapid urbanisation. We introduce New Institutionalism as a novel conceptual framework to analyse the interactions between the...

How do cultural practices influence the process of participatory governance within local administrative structures? We address this question by reflecting cultural dimensions, such as collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance within a contextual sensitive “cultural sensemaking”...