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Rural society is increasingly open to a globalized world, and migration from rural areas to cities is becoming increasingly important. Many rural areas face depopulation, an aging population, and limited access to a range of services. To address this challenge, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) involved in the concept of smart villages have much to offer. In order to streamline the debate, this chapter proposes a methodology based on resilience. Resilience is defined as the ability of a habitat or system to recover to its initial state when the disturbance to which it has been subjected has ceased. In this regard, a retrospective of rural areas is proposed based on the experience of the garden city model, for which the advantages of rural areas were evident over those of urban areas. The objective is to reconsider the intrinsic qualities of rural areas in order to recover and enhance them with the added value of the European Union (EU) Smart Villages approach. These facets will be the driving forces behind sustainable development. In conclusion, a number of recommendations are presented, including the development of a catalog, structured by regions and territories, of rural areas and their different potentials and opportunities, for the development of smart villages projects.

Faced with the challenges of rural population decline, combined with the widespread expansion of homesteads in rural areas, local Chinese governments hope to strictly control and minimize rural housing land. Accurately decomposing the process of rural housing expansion and revealing its driving factors will be helpful for land-use regulation by the government.

In this study, an unusually rich dataset of rural housing registration from Pudong New Area in Shanghai is employed. The study aimed to decompose the fragmented accumulation process and its expansion determinants on rural housing assets. The dataset covers all samples of rural households and housing plots at 72 surveyed villages in six towns.

Housing offers profitable capital and earning assets to villagers at the urban fringe, so they have a powerful incentive to build and expand more. The results of this analysis showed that the expansion of rural housing is largely due to the haphazard construction of auxiliary rooms by villagers, especially on plots of arable land that are adjacent to their houses that have been stealthily converted into auxiliary rooms and sheds. Low costs and weak penalties have led to an increase in rent-seeking expansions to rural houses. Houses with the smaller initial areas, families with more laborers and household heads, and the proximity of villages to downtown with convenient living services were the main driving factors for expanding houses. A concerted effort is needed to control the disorganized and unlicensed expansion of housing. This effort should include formulating areas for free use by villagers, high taxes on overused areas, serious penalties for unlicensed housing expansion and effective land-use planning.

An understanding of the expansion status and control measures related to rural houses in Shanghai provides an important reference that can help to guide the formulation of rural housing policies, and the sustainable development of cities worldwide. Of course, this study cannot generalize about housing distribution and expansion status worldwide based on the study area in China, because China's land tenure policies are unique. But land registry data exists that makes research like this feasible. There is a need to carefully examine the detailed housing distribution in each country before it can be decided on how best to address the disorderly increase in rural housing stock, and promote the reduction of rural residential expansion.

First, the process of rural housing expansion by using an unique dataset which covers ten thousands of samples is revealed. Second, the results have policy implications for reducing the amount of idle and inefficiently rural homestead. The focus is on rural housing growth and its driving factors in Shanghai, and the villagers' motivations for housing expansion are explored.

The purpose of this paper is to identify bank deserts in the USA in 2009 and 2015, separately for inner city, suburban, and rural areas. It also identifies correlations between bank deserts, population characteristics, market competition, and payday lending restrictions, both cross-sectionally and over time.

FDIC data on bank office locations are used to identify bank deserts, defined as the 5 percent of census tracts with the greatest distance from the centroid to the nearest office. Those data are matched to both American Community Survey data to identify population characteristics, to a list of states with payday lending prohibitions, and to levels of market competition. An alternative measure of bank deserts corrects for population density. Geography is analyzed, mean characteristics compared, and random effects regressions capture static and dynamic correlates.

Population density explains approximately half of bank distance variance. Bank deserts appear more often in southern and western states, and expanded significantly in inner cities while contracting in rural areas. Regression results suggest that African Americans were overall and increasingly likely to live in bank deserts and Native Americans were overall more likely to live in rural bank deserts. Rural poverty is linked to bank deserts, and the effects of competition are complex.

The space for policy intervention exists in African American inner cities and Native American rural communities.

The relative measure of bank deserts is novel, as are dynamic estimates and random effects analysis of correlates.

In the 69 years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, especially the 40 years since the reform and opening-up, the relationship between urban and rural areas has undergone profound change. When the deepening reform of the urban-rural relationship is entering a critical period, it is necessary to reassess the evolution of the urban-rural relationship in China and draw a picture for that relationship in the future. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper combs the policies on the urban and rural development since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and analyzes macro data on the industries, population, personal income, and other aspects.

The study found that this urbanism affects individuals’ lives and the choices of society through the will of the state, and then provides feedback at the whole level of social values.

This paper divides the evolution of China’s urban-rural relationship into two major stages – nurturing cities with rural areas and leading rural areas with cities, which are then subdivided into five periods. The features of the relationship between the urban and rural areas in different periods are analyzed, and the future development of urban-rural relations is also considered.

The aim of this paper is to consider empirical evidence on the strategic behaviour of rural SMEs compared to urban SMEs in times of difficult economic conditions. The authors build the paper from a theoretical discussion that suggests that there will be distinctive differences in SMEs’ strategic behaviour across different settlement patterns, utilising resource‐based and opportunity‐based theoretical perspectives. This leads to three research questions which are concerned with three elements when comparing urban and rural SMEs; their characteristics, their performance and their strategic behaviours. The paper argues that the role and strategic behaviour of SMEs in the literature has been neglected.

For this study, the paper is able to draw upon a data set of 1,411 SMEs from an annual survey of New Zealand's SMEs. This is a national survey of SMEs and the paper has analysed the data to draw out distinctive differences with firms located in different urban or rural locations.

The paper has shown that SMEs in independent urban areas/small town settlements have distinctive characteristics, performance and strategic behaviour. The important findings are that geographical location matters; that impacts of changing economic conditions cannot be assumed to be homogenous across economies and that SMEs across different settlement patterns will adopt different strategic response and behaviours.

The paper provides an original contribution to knowledge through the following: a primary focus on the comparison of urban and rural SMEs’ strategic behaviour in challenging and turbulent economic conditions, providing for the first time empirical evidence on the sustainability of rural SMEs in recessionary times compared to urban firms across three different locational settlement patterns; urban, independent urban and rural.

Since the start of the twenty‐first century China has stepped into a new stage of harmonious urban‐rural development. Based on the brief review of policy changes since the new century, the purpose of this paper is to figure out the comprehensive policy framework, and analyze its background and reasons.

First, this paper offers a brief review of China's rural reform with focus on the policy framework and changes since the reform of rural tax and fee system in 2000. Next, the paper focuses on food security to discuss grain price increase and China's grain imports, then the current problems facing China's agricultural and rural development are discussed and countermeasures provided.

The paper finds that several policies have been implemented toward the coordination between urban and rural areas and toward the integration of urban and rural development. However, China's grain production is still facing big challenges, both from the increasing demand and the resource constraint. Therefore, food security should be given priority in future. China's current rural reform and development is also facing the problems such as slow growth of farmer's income, the impacts of migrant rural labourer on economy and society and the outflow of rural resources.

This paper reviews systematically major policies of China's agriculture and rural development, and analyzes the characteristics of and reasons for China's grain price increase. Meanwhile, the constraint of resources, especially land and water, is also studied in detail. The paper's analysis can provide important advice for future policy making.

The purpose of this paper is to verify the development of economic activities in rural areas in terms of their public infrastructural equipment.

As a case study, the Polish rural areas were selected. A two-stage survey was conducted in 2015. The first stage involved entrepreneurs from rural areas. The second stage of survey was data collection for rural areas regarding economic activity and infrastructural equipment. In total, 121 objects (communes) were selected. The multicriteria analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method was used for the analysis.

The results demonstrate that for each kind of business, communication accessibility is the most important criterion. By contrast, environmental awareness and concern for the environment is the least important element for pursuit of the economic activity in rural areas.

Limitations are connected mainly with the applied AHP method. The number of the comparable elements at the same hierarchy level is limited due to practical purposes. In addition, an assumption of full comparability of elements (criteria and alternatives) in the hierarchy model can be discussed. Furthermore, data quality and availability limit the scope of the empirical work. This study is a major simplification of reality modeling, but it gives practical benefits by simplifying the decision support procedure.

The findings of this paper contribute to the advancing theory of local development, with public infrastructure being one of its basic elements (factor of production). This paper explores the importance of physical infrastructure for different economic activities, and thus offers theoretical insights in two areas. First, this paper indicates the uneven weight of each infrastructure element for the various business sectors. Second, based on the collected data, this study also contributes to the literature, by using the AHP method to explore the relationships between infrastructural equipment and economic activity in rural areas. As the practical implication for local and regional development policies, this study indicates, that the most important criterion for each kind of economic activity is communication accessibility. This kind of public investment should be undertaken primarily to support entrepreneurship, especially in rural areas.

The uniqueness of the method lies in assumption about the uneven weights of infrastructure elements and therefore their impact on the process of ranking the objects (rural areas). The weight of individual infrastructure elements will vary depending on the kind of economic activity; therefore, the way of ordering will also be different for each economic activity.

The purpose of this paper is to ground in serious empirical evidence the debate on whether the post-reform acceleration in growth has helped bring poverty down for all economic, social and religious groups and in all state or has left certain groups or states.

The paper uses unit-level data from the so-called thick rounds of expenditure surveys by National Sample Survey (NSS) in the years 1993-1994, 2004-2005, 2009-2010 and 2011-2012 and estimates the proportion of the population below the official Tendulkar line. Adequate care is taken to address the issue of sample size in reporting the estimates.

Whether we slice the data by social, religious or economic groups, by states or by rural and urban areas, poverty has significantly declined between 1993-1994 and 2011-2012 with a substantial acceleration during the faster-growth period from 2004-2005 to 2011-2012. Poverty rates among the disadvantaged social groups and minorities have declined faster so that the gap in poverty rates between them and the general population has declined. In 7 of the 16 states with large Muslim populations, the poverty rate for them is now below that for the Hindus.

Use of survey data has its limitations, especially when the sample sizes are small. The paper also does not assess the direct contribution of growth in relation to that through redistribution.

The paper presents implications for identification of the poor for the purpose of designing targeted interventions.

This is the first paper to offer up-to-date estimates of poverty by social, religious and economic groups, by states and by rural and urban areas.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of digital inclusive finance on entrepreneurial activities in rural areas, as well as the underlying mechanisms and the variations of this impact across regions and household characteristics.

Utilizing the China Household Finance Survey Data, this paper applies the Two-Stage Least Squares with instrumental variables to assess the effect of digital inclusive finance on rural entrepreneurship.

The empirical findings indicate that digital inclusive finance significantly promotes entrepreneurial activities in rural areas by alleviating credit constraints, reducing financial information barriers, and altering risk attitudes for rural households. Additionally, this effect is more pronounced in the eastern region of China and for the “opportunity entrepreneurial activities.” Furthermore, the impact varies across rural households' income and consumption status, as well as the personal characteristics of household heads.

Firstly, this study broadens our understanding of the mechanisms through which digital inclusive finance influences entrepreneurial activities, thereby filling a gap in existing entrepreneurship research. Secondly, the study's findings affirm the inclusive nature of digital finance, contributing significantly to the literature on regional equality and illuminating potential pathways toward achieving “common prosperity.”

European policy has had over time two main features: welfare state and democracy. Both issues have defined the model of development in Europe and have led to the European integration project. This model of development and continental integration based on the principles of democracy, freedom and solidarity has proven to work. But, nowadays challenges like globalisation or European enlargement require new instruments to promote and enhance this model.