The main forces affecting rural regions in 2020
David Freshwater
Village and Agriculture (Wieś i Rolnictwo), 2021, vol. 189, issue 4
Abstract:
Rural regions in OECD countries have always faced development challenges resulting from: dependence on natural resources, scarce labour resources, long distances from markets, and the effects of globalisation. Today, their development opportunities are further constrained by: the demands of climate change, increased economic instability and ‘vulnerability’ – resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the lingering effects of the 2008 recession, and the uneven impact of the internet economy. However, from a rural development policy perspective, perhaps the most important new challenge may be the rise of rural populism. Rural residents have long been perceived differently from urban residents, and over the past two decades this gap has increased. Importantly, while the internet and information and communication technologies (ICTs) were initially seen as tools that could improve social cohesion and integrate different areas and urban and rural populations, they now seem to have instead increased tensions between them. Since the basic values of urban and rural people have developed separately, they are very different and it is difficult to achieve the political compromise required to create effective policies for national governments. As a result, the chances of national governments being able to create and implement coherent rural development policies are diminished.
Keywords: Community/Rural/Urban; Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/344656/files/Freshwater.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:polvaa:344656
DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.344656
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Village and Agriculture (Wieś i Rolnictwo) from Polish Academy of Sciences (IRWiR PAN), Institute of Rural and Agricultural Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().