Changing Villages Typology of Rural Settlements in Hungary at the Beginning of the Third Millennium

Abstract

The change of regime resulted in fundamental changes in the processes transforming the rural settlements as well; the further decrease in the agricultural population, the dissolution or the tranformation of the majority of cooperatives followed by the newly emerged dominance of private farms, the changes in basic public services, and the reshape of the labor market had a far-reaching effect on the structure, society and geographic characteristics of the villages of the socialist era.

The paper's aim is to assess this process, with classifying the types of rural settlements in Hungary at the beginning of the 21 st century by using factor- and cluster-analysis.