Lithuania's rural areas cover more than 97 % of countire’s territory and are home to 33 % of people. However, despite the EU and the Lithuanian resources allocated to rural and agricultural development, rural areas continue to decline. In order to manage this process, it is necessary to identify the processes that taking place and critically evaluate to take appropriate decisions on the future development of rural areas.
Objective of the study - rural development in 2001-2010 and identification of possible trends for the 2014 - New programming period. Goals of the study:
- identify the key factors for rural development and to define a system of indicators;
- investigate the methods for forecasting practices of rural development and the main results for the EU and Lithuania;
- to produce an analysis of Lithuanian of demographic, economic, social, infrastructure processes development in 2001-2010 and identify the likely direction of rural development up to 2014;
- to provide proposals for rural development management.
The study carried out to identify the key factors for rural development and to develop the system of indicators for its analysis. The EU and Lithuanian scientists experience of research in rural development trends monitoring and forecasting was analized, the analysis of 2001-2010 rural development processes and trends was done, which showed that the values of main demographic indicators will deteriorate, not only in absolute terms, but compared with similar indicators of the urban population; steady increase in permeability of internet in rural areas was at the same time accompanied by steady decrease in accesibility of services provided by other infrastructure like social care, education, transportaion and other; the role of agriculture in rural areas will continue to decline while we will see steady increase of the role of services and industrial sectors, farmers' income will continue to increase to compare with other rural population groups; rural unemployment and poverty, youth unemployment, education indicators will continue to obtain the values lower than for urban population.
Key words: rural development factors, rural development indicators system, rural development trends, rural development perspectives, forecasting methods.