Rural areas in Central and Eastern Europe are very often associated with a backwardness in terms of income and employment opportunities, a high dependency on agriculture, the out-migration of young, skilled people, a low population density and an insufficient infrastructure. In this paper 3 typologies are presented, which show that rural areas cannot be considered homogeneous and not all of them need the same developmental measures. The first typology classified all NUTS-3 regions in the ten Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC-10) by means of cluster analysis according to 7 demographic and socio-economic criteria. The result revealed 5 different types of regions as most adequate: three are largely rural, one includes both rural, and especially... |