Agriculture and employment in the rural regions of the EU (RUREMPLO).

The goal of this project is to find factors that influence the employment development in rural regions of the European Union. For this EU regions have first been clustered according to employment development, share of agriculture and share of population living in urban communities. In a second step data of possible factors have been collected and correlated with employment development - within and among the clusters - in order to get a first impression of dependencies. In a third step each participant (9 countries) selected one region with a more than on average increase of employment and one with bad employment development. Those regions will now be analysed by field and desk studies in order to get more general insights, examine those hypotheses which were raised in the second step and get useful information especially for the lagging regions how they could manage to perform better.