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 use of georeferenced data in geographical research into unemployment reveals internal fluctuations and differences within localities. The observation unit in the present paper is a 1x1 km grid cell. The results obtained here indicate that the rate of unemployment in Finland during 1993-95...

We examined the association of health and well-being with moving using a detailed geographical scale. 7845 men and women born in northern Finland in 1966 were surveyed by postal questionnaire in 1997 and linked to 1 km2 geographical grids based on each subject's home address in 1997–2000....

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 aim of this paper is to analyse emergence of rural expert networks and their function on the basis of an example network. The case study concerns the European Rural Development Network (ERDN). Networking has been regarded as a central model of action during this century for most of fields of...

Rural Studies is a network initiative between ten Finnish universities. This paper discusses Rural Studies as an innovative approach for pulling together the limited national resources of academic rural expertise. There are many background factors for the establishment of Rural Studies network,...

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...

Finnish farmers' role as energy producers is small compared to their role as energy resource owners. Since climate and energy policy in Finland continues favoring large-scale energy visions, additional investment support for agriculture will stay modest. To utilize fully the energy potential in...