This volume of proceedings, available as both a hard copy and a pdf file, is an edited compilation of selected contributions to the MACE Conference 2009, held in Berlin, Germany, at the ICC from 14 to 15 January 2009. We would like to thank all those persons and organisations who contributed to...

Over fifteen years have elapsed since the transition from the centrally planned economic system started in the early 1990âs. During this time agricultural and rural areas of Central and Eastern Europe have undergone profound structural changes with wide variations in the degree of...

Seit der Gründung des GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 1947 wird auf multilateraler Ebene versucht, durch graduellen Zollabbau und Reduzierung nicht-tarifärer Handelshemmnisse ein freies Welthandelssystem zu schaffen. Die Liberalisierung landwirtschaftlicher Märkte ist...

This paper investigates comparative trade advantages in agro-food trade. We analyze comparative advantages of Hungarian, Croatian and Slovenian agro-food trade in the European Union (EU) markets. Both the levels and pattern of the revealed comparative advantage measure are investigated. The...

Decades of Soviet rule have left a heritage of environmental and social problems in Central Asia. The demise of an entire ecosystem at unprecedented pace, the "Aral Sea Syndrome", is the most prominent of the undesired outcomes of the focus on agricultural production that has dominated land and...

This paper presents the results of a case study of local economic development in Dolina Strugu, Podkarpackie voivodship, Poland. Its aim is to analyse local development problems and chances, to investigate the potential of endogenous initiatives to support economic development, and to examine...

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the gap in economic development between rural and urban regions in Poland has continuously grown. Increasing income disparities and the lack of job opportunities have already led to an outflow of young people out of and an increasing obsolescence in rural areas....

Polish rural areas, compared to other EU-25 member states, still show a high agricultural employment due to a lack of job opportunities in other rural economic sectors. In particular, in South-eastern Poland the shut down of heavy industry companies in the early 1990s left many rural inhabitants...