Rural Labour Market and Rural Economy of Serbia - Income Diversification as a Tool to Overcome Rural Poverty

The project is on diversification of the rural economy of Serbia as a way to overcome rural poverty. The poverty in Serbia is primarily rural phenomenon and the differences in poverty rates between the urban and rural areas are deepening. High rates of rural poverty are due to the low diversification of rural economy as well as an excessive dependence on agriculture. That is why we are going to look at opportunities to reduce poverty through agricultural growth and rural labor market activation. Basic goal is to be verified empirically the effects of different models that would activate the rural resources in order to increase employment and generate an additional income. The project activities defined in the 4 Work packages: Poverty and development inequalities; Relevant policies and institutional framework; Entrepreneurship and rural non-farm economy and Models of activity and income diversification of rural households. The source of data will be the results of survey on national representative sample of rural households. The result of the project will be recommendations for improvement legal, policy and institutional framework to an increase of agricultural competitiveness and rural entrepreneurship. Dissemination of results will be made to the international scientific community, primarily to the regional one due to a high compatibility and importance of the topic for the countries of the region, then to the all decision makers and rural stakeholders as well.