The rural economy is subject to more frequent, cyclical crises, as well as problems in areas such as land and resource management.
Conclusions and Future Directions
1. We agree with the OECD in that rural areas are places of opportunity. The OECD’s research to data has highlighted how to understand the relationship between urban and rural economies, the growing rural-urban inequalities in OECD economies, and provided worthwhile proposals on how to counter them.
2. We encourage that the OECD expand this positive research agenda to include the role of finance in modern economies. In order to obtain the opportunities visible in rural communities, financialisation should be put on the policy agenda in order to get a more precise picture of the challenges to rural development and how to overcome them.
3. As a starting point, the above findings can used to further develop the Draft Principles, and the Rural 3.0. These include the ways in which finance impacts upon urban-rural relations and drives urbanisation, how it can act as an obstacle to growth in rural economies and makes them more prone to crises of various kinds.
4. This should serve only as a starting point and is certainly not the full story. At present, there is a considerable lack of empirical macro-data regarding the effects of financialisation on rural communities, especially its relationship to issues such as urbanisation and underdevelopment. The OECD should begin by recognising finance as a ‘mega-trend’, including it on the research and policy agenda for future development work.