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The development of the Mexican rural sector is vital because it is the source of raw materials needed for production in the manufacturing sector. Thus, it is indeed important that its development follow that of the industrial sector. The main objective of the present research is to evaluate the growth of the rural sector during the presidential term of Felipe Calderon (2007-2012) and to discover the lights and shadows that revolve around this suffering sector of the Mexican economy. The analyzed statistical evidence shows an important lag and stagnation of the development of the rural sector since 1960 in Mexico. Additionally, a decrease in the contributions of the rural sector to the entire economic development in Mexico in 2012, compared to the one registered 33 years ago (in 1979), is considered. The statistical evidence supports the conclusion that the Mexican rural sector has not been able to show any progress, regardless of the noble governmental initiatives and efforts. Financial government resources should not only be directed to pay salaries and subsidies, but through a more effective leadership, the agricultural government agencies could try to increase investment in infrastructure, development, and application of new technologies set in the context of civic responsibility, ethics, and a sustainable development approach.

AbstractThis paper, based on a survey of farm households in Uganda's Masaka district, analyses the impact of the country's economic decline on the rural sector. The economic crisis has reduced the flow of resources from the urban areas, in terms of both goods and services and remittances from urban‐based relatives. To preserve their livelihoods, rural dwellers have had to diversify their sources of income. Ability to do this is constrained not only by household characteristics, such as size, age and education of head and time endowment, but also by economic variables such as the existence of markets, size of land holding and credit availability. It is argued that to reincorporate peasants into the modern sector it is necessary to remove the barriers which prevent them from realizing a fair return on their production factors and assets.

In this article the author analyses the evolution of Brazil's agrarian sector in recent decades and some of its socioeconomic implications both in rural and urban environment. Although a high and sustained rate of economic growth was achieved between the 1950s and the 1970s, a number of serious political, economic and social problems including a far reaching agrarian reform can be solved only by the consolidation of the country's democracy

Agribusiness companies operating in China are transacting in various forms with small agricultural producers, and in doing so, transforming the household-based agriculture in rural China. We argue that the presence of these distinct forms and the diverging relations between agribusiness and producers show the central importance of China's collective land rights. China's unique system of land rights – featuring collective ownership but individualized usage rights – has acted as a powerful force in shaping interactions between agribusiness and direct producers. It provides farmers a source of economic income as well as political bargaining power – albeit to various degrees – and restricts corporate actors from dispossessing farmers of their land. Because agribusinesses are able to work with small-scale producers in order to produce the high-scale production they need, we argue that Chinese leaders do not need to scale up land holdings in order to modernize agriculture. If China continues to provide land-use rights, China's smallscale producers can benefit from this modernization in unanticipated ways.

During the central planning era, rural development in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) was frequently associated with agricultural development. Recently, opinion has begun to move away from this position. Attention is now focusing on the role of the non-farm sector in the context of rural development because of this sector's potential for absorbing excess labor from agriculture, alleviating problems caused by urban-rural migration, contributing to income growth, and promoting a more equitable distribution of income. At the beginning of the transformation process in transition countries, economic policies focused mainly on macroeconomic problems, and the increasing income disparity between rural and urban regions was ignored. We now know that the increasing inter-regional divergence in the transition economies is one of the major transformation problems. This is one of the reasons why the World Bank, OECD, and the EU have formulated special rural development strategies.