Rural restructuring and local/regional governance in the Baltic States after 1990

2009

The aim of this paper is to discuss the restructuring of primary sector dominant rural areas in the Baltic States with a special focus on local governance and administrative structures. In the theoretical part, we elaborate on a principal transformation model for Baltic rural areas. Despite similar macro-economic processes in all three Baltic States, local and regional governance has developed differently and hypothetically, this has had a different impact on the economic development of regions. We have used statistics, legal documents, small case studies, observations and secondary sources of some more detailed studies for this paper.