Rural Development Indicators and Diversity in the European Union

This paper will discuss the main findings and recommendations of a report for Eurostat on rural development indicators (Bryden, Copus and MacLeod, 2002). Findings of recent research on the Dynamics of Rural Areas (DORA) in the EU will also be taken into consideration. The main question in the Eurostat work was: in the light of recent changes in rural policies what new social and economic indicators are needed and have been developed by individual EU Member States which might feasibly be applied at EU level? We proposed a ‘territorial’ framework and identified three main indicator themes concerning: Social Well-being, Economic Structure and Performance, and Population and Migration. Within these themes we assessed some 500 indicators using the standard criteria of sensitivity, analytical soundness, comprehensibility, reference value, and policy relevance. From these, we selected 55 indicators that we considered to represent “best practice” in addressing the needs of Rural Development policy makers and practitioners. The DORA research on the other hand was aimed at identifying the main factors responsible for differences in economic performance over the medium term (10-20 years) among rural areas in similar geographical and policy contexts. 1 Professor John Bryden is Co-Director of the Arkleton Centre for Rural Development Research and Chair of Human Geography at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. At the time of this conference, he was also RUPRI Fellow 2002 and Visiting Professor at the Truman School of Public Affairs, University of Missouri-Columbia. Email: [email protected] 2 The European Union’s Statistical Office, based in Luxembourg. 3 ‘DORA’ – a 4-country, 16 study area project funded under the Fourth Framework Programme for Research and Technology Development and completed in December 2001. See Bryden, et al (2001) and Bryden & Hart (2003f).