Replaced with revised version of paper 10/06/09.

Everybody knows: rural regions offer fewer possibilities for non-farm employment than urban areas. For this reason, it was the semi-subsistence farm structures that had to absorb the released workers from the big rural state enterprises and the urban-rural migrants fleeing unemployment in the...

Semi-subsistence farm households (SFHs) have persevered in Central and Southeastern Europe. An outlook on future perspectives of SFHs asks for reliable information on the phenomenon of SFHs and the impact of policy measures on their development options: (1) intensifying farming, (2) diversifying...

Innovation and new technology adoption represent two central elements for the enterprise and industry development process in agriculture. The objective of this paper is to develop a farm-household model able to simulate the impacts of uncertainty in SFP, the selling price of energy and...

The objective of this paper is to analyse farm strategies and investment behaviour in a sample of selected Italian farm-households facing different scenarios, with a particular focus on the effects of the 2003 CAP reform. Models were built for individual households using multi-criteria dynamic...

The aim of this paper is to test empirically the role of both cognitive and structural social capital in explaining the repayment performance of individual members under joint liability borrowing in rural Armenia. Based on unique primary data collected in 2006 in Ararat, Armavir and Vayots Dzor...

The European Union (EU) is the main source of remittances world wide and Albania, struck by abject poverty, is Europe’s number one country sending out migrants. Albania’s economy as well as its households’ welfare strongly depend on remittances. Consequently, the topic of migration is...

Following the two rounds of land reform in Ukraine since independence, household plot farmers emerged as the major suppliers to agricultural production. But they form a very heterogeneous group. Not all of them are equally successful, economically, and integrated to markets. In general, a...

A fuzzy logic model for quantifying farm households’ potential for non-farm income diversification is developed and applied to 1,077 farm households in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia. About three quarters of households have a diversification potential, but not all households...

We investigate how the perception for wide-spread bribing culture affects rural non-farm startup plans in transition. The study contributes to the literature on rural entrepreneurship and the role of institutional factors as drivers of entrepreneurial decisions. Using primary farm household data...