European economic geography

Review
European Economic Geography
Paper within Economic Geography Author: Vinicius Falcão Tutor: Lars Pettersson Jönköping March 2009

Table of Contents 1 A brief summary of the article 1 2 A critical reflection of strong and weak elements 1
2.1 Strong elements 1
2.2 Weak elements...................................................................................................2 3 A constructive suggestion of how the problems that are addressed could be analyzed/worked with in the future...........3

1 A brief summary of the article

The article, “The Role of Farm Households and the Agro-food Sector in the Economy of Rural Areas: Evidence and Policy Implications” begins with the following phrase: “This study aims to examine the role of farm households and the agro-food sector in the rural economy”. With this sentence, the article tries to show the importance of agriculture in the current rural economy and also proposes that a number of factors are related and can influence these two sectors.

It presents a summary at the beginning and is then divided into two parts. Part I presents the agriculture in the rural economy in a lot of aspects as international and national rural classifications, including population, territory, employment and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Part II presents the farm households in the rural economy showing diversification activities, the income situation, factors explaining diversification, and the effect of policies on farm household diversification.

As different countries take part in the OECD, all the statistics in the article are divided as Predominantly Rural (PR), Intermediate (IN) and Predominantly Urban (PU) areas, showing the differences according to the percentage of population living in rural communities.

It is an important study, first of all, because agriculture is still an important sector of the economy in a lot of countries that are in the OECD. Consequently, knowledge of