Due to the increasing priority orientated towards more integrated policy concepts, such as rural development policy, there is a growing need to address the concept of multifunctionality for policy assessment. In particular, the dependence of the various tasks and services provided by agriculture...

Compared to urban regions, rural areas can be seen as historicaly marginal space. They, as a rule, leve behind in the process of participation in general developmental trends, mainly due to lack of local capital stock and personalities. Marginality, however, is a context dependet phenomenon and...

Landscape change today is occurring more rapidly than in any other time in history. Among other influences such as global warming these changes are also driven by political decisions affecting ecosystem services. The overall research objective is to defi ne how the European Union’s...

This paper aims at analyzing business services in bioenergy investments and innovations on farms in the Northern Ostrobothnia region in Finland. Finance into research of bioenergy has strongly increased during the last years both in Finland and Europe. Primary focus of this research has been so...

The strategy for rural development provides a differentiated approach to each type of rural areas. Particularly "sensitive " areas for rural development in Poland are remote rural areas, which are dominated by small farms with small economic strength. In many cases further agricultural...

This paper discusses the challenges that the next EU programming period has given to rural policy. In the case of Finland the most important level of implementing regional and rural policies so far has been provinces (NUTS 3) but in 2007—2013 both the EU Commission and our national rural...

The present paper intends to make an analysis at regional level, respectively in Galati county, in order to determine the present situation of agriculture in the South-East region of Romania; it investigates the possibility of changing the crop structure towards more added value such as...

Core objectives for rural development support for the programming period 2007-2013 are: (1) improving the competitiveness of agriculture and forestry, (2) improving the environment and the countryside, and (3) improving the quality of life in rural areas and encouraging diversification of...

Slovakia is the country with unusually appropriate conditions for development of tourism. Therefore the governmental programmes with economic development of rural area as one of their priorities emphasise diversification of economic activities including creation of new work opportunities in the...

The background, criteria and scope of the spatial definition of LFA are very similar in both countries. Farm eligibility criteria are entirely different. In Slovakia the whole agricultural area of a holding is eligible for payment. In the Czech Republic it is only the area of grassland. Only the...