EMPLOYMENT CRISIS IN AGRICULTURE AND THE SPATIAL INEQUALITIES IN HUNGARY

Main objective of the paper is to discover Hungary’s rural areas suffering from agricultural employment crisis and to compare them to the spatial inequalities, examining the development possibilities and the adaptability to new economic and social processes. The actuality of this objective has been given by the recent processes in the global, European and Hungarian economy, the growing importance of local development and endogenous resources, the decreasing role of agriculture in total employment, and the general problems of rural areas. Based on multivariable statistical methods (factorial-, discriminant- and cluster analyses) and the data of 15 years before the EU accession, the selected micro-regions could be reliable separated by the economical state and social situation, the education, and the dependence on the agriculture. It can be stated that the concentrated, long-term agricultural unemployment is in close correlation to territorial inequalities, due to the unfavorable demographic and educational structure of the labor-force leaving the agriculture, the inadequate local resources, the underdevelopment and the lack of other possibilities of employment common to the identified micro-regions.