The article deals with the problems of the economic and demographic situation in the rural areas of Lithuania. The article contains a brief review of distribution of farms according to the size and area of cultivated land. Special attention is paid to the changes of rural population and the...

Danish rural areas comprise 15% of the population and the bulk of agricultural production. Compared with urban areas, rural areas have generally been lacking a little behind in terms of employment, population and income levels in recent decades. However, seen in a European perspective, the...

The sparsely populated northern Sweden has been the main target area for regional policy efforts since the 1960s. A rich variety of regional policy measures have been launched over the years. However, despite this and a heavy expansion of welfare undertakings a significant depopulation has taken...

The paper presents the approach to the analysis of spatial relationships between the town and surrounding rural areas. The main objective was to compare the competitiveness and living conditions of the areas located in the surroundings of towns with different number of inhabitants and situated...

Although the contribution of agricultural production to national income decreased from 58% in 1947 to 3.3% in 2001, Polish agriculture still provides employment to roughly 20% of the total of persons employed in the country. Average size of individual farms increased from 7.2 hectares in 1990 to...

The Austrian Rural Development Programme of the current period 2000 - 2006 includes the measure "Vocational training" to improve the qualification of persons involved in agriculture and forestry as well as to help them convert their operations to other uses. The educational measures play an...

The statistical analysis of rural change is traditionally based on classifications of administrative regions, like municipalities or provinces. These classifications do not allow fine-grained interregional analysis of rural change. Especially in sparsely-populated countries, like Finland, the...

The theory of path dependency reveals that in the territories, where the population is characterized with worsened structure, the infrastructure is affected by underdeveloped problems and the amenities are not enough evinced, it is difficult to expect designation of activities, creating new...

"Leader" approach is the main tool of the policy of sustainable rural development. However a number of strategic and organizational problems and also certain rules for its application in the praxis need to be formulated for its effective realization in Bulgaria. The strategic frameworkfor rural...

In the era of the information society, the existence and quality of the rural municipality's own website is an important factor of its competitiveness. Therefore, the state or regional governments sometimes support the construction of municipality websites. This process is just starting and the...