Smallscale peasant type farming has had varying importance in the course of time, but has always been part of rural economy. Following the change of regime in 1989-1990, the large scale farming structure founded during state socialism was dissolved throughout the Central and Eastern European region. Th ese changes led to the revival of the family farms. After the collapse of the socialist agricultural farm structure, the smallscale family farms became the most widespread farm type. Nonetheless, the new agricultural structure still faces conflicts. One of the most serious problems is the lack of manpower and capital coupled withobsolete production technologies. The extremely fragmented farmsmake farming ineffi cient. It seems that the traditional rural peasant society has been preserved, and only a few examples of ambition, project planning and risk taking ability can be spotted. In this paper I would like on the one hand to summarise the factors that determined the spread of smallscale landownership in Transylvania; on the other hand I would like to shed light upon the challenges posed by market economy based on a case study of a village (Siklód).

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The intention of the regional development policy is to provide equal opportunities especially for disadvantaged townships. Contrary to this, empirical evidence shows that very similar settlements have diverse tendering activities. By tendering activity we mean settlements' participation in the project proposal activity. Th is paper presents the determining factors of local governments' tendering activities in the Kaposvár micro-region from Hungary. The objective factors aff ecting tendering activity we fi nd the site and position of the settlement, the number and composition of the population, the number of economic institutions, etc.
However, there can be some subjective factors which can infl uence the varying tendering activity, such as the personality and social network of the major, or the composition of the local government's council, etc.

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A region's competitiveness and future performance is determined by its capacity to retain its population. Th is capacity on the other hand influences the structure of the region's labour market both qualitatively and quantitatively. Th us, improving the attractiveness of the region, retaining the population, as well as off ering incentives for its inhabitants not to migrate become primordial objectives of economic and regional policies. According to international studies changes in the structure of economies, as well as the growth of the service sector have led to an increase of the share of women in total employment. Of course, growing female employment has been strongly related to migration. In the peripheral and mostly underdeveloped rural regions of Europe traditional male economic subsectors have maintained their dominant role.
This may have contributed to the gender selective nature of migration: as a reaction to the lack of employment opportunities in the home country young women have become more likely to migrate, creating thus a numerical male dominance in the younger generations in the sending societies. In our paper we study fi ve regions of the European Union [(Saxony-Anhalt (Germany), Kainuu (Finnland), Västernorrland (Sweeden), North-Great-Plain and North-Hungary (Hungary)] in order to explore the reasons and consequences of female migration, to identify the needs and expectations of young men and women living in the rural areas, and finally, to analyse the relationship between the unbalanced gender ratio in the young adult generations and economic development.

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In the last two-three years administrative-territorial reform has become one of the most widely debated, most mediatised issues of the Romanian public opinion, especially after the determination of the ruling coalition to carry out in 2013 (in one year!) a thorough and comprehensive regionalisation and decentralisation reform. Although a wide debate emerged involving a series of actors from the public, to the academic and political spheres, instead of an in-depth comprehensive analysis of the question of administrative-territorial reform in Romania, the discourse was mainly catalysed by superfi cial studies and models proposed by various political stakeholders. Th is process mainly resulted in the frequent publication of several maps presenting the new administrative/territorial structure of Romania, very often generating heated, but superfi cial public debates. Unfortunately, the negative aspects of the public debate also characterised the government's reform project, which – amidst superfi ciality and hasty preparation – not surprisingly ended up in failure.
In this respect, of course, the following article does not and cannot answer all of the above questions; instead the text can be interpreted more like a refl ection, which through its specific space-time perspective analyses the issue of regionalisation from the establishment of the first instance of administrative-territorial organisation of the Romanian nation state until present day Romania (1859–2013). Th erefore the article opens with a brief introduction to the concept of regions and regionalisation, while the second part chronologically presents past meso-level administrative-territorial structures of the last 154 years through a thorough scientific analysis. This unique historic-geographical perspective, as well as the analysis of the past heritage clearly sheds new light upon administrative-territorial reform of today's Romania.

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