During the central planning era, rural development in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) was frequently associated with agricultural development. Recently, opinion has begun to move away from this position. Attention is now focusing on the role of the non-farm sector in the context of rural development because of this sector’s potential for absorbing excess labor from agriculture, alleviating problems caused by urban-rural migration, contributing to income growth, and promoting a more equitable distribution of income. At the beginning of the transformation process in transition countries, economic policies focused mainly on macroeconomic problems, and the increasing income disparity between rural and urban regions was ignored. We now know that the increasing inter-regional divergence in the transition economies is one of the major transformation problems. This is one of the reasons why the World Bank, OECD, and the EU have formulated special rural development strategies
