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The sharp deceleration of credit growth to the private sector in the EU, after half a decade of exuberance, will inevitably squeeze households and enterprises and can only aggravate the worsening recession. The region experienced very rapid credit growth in recent years, which was generally viewed positively as supporting rapid convergence to the but at the same time it contributed to the emergence of sizable macroeconomic and financial vulnerabilities. European Governments should use monetary and fiscal policy and not only in order to stimulate domestic non-governmental credit growth because it is crucial for the recovery of the European economies. Within emerging markets, eastern European economies have been the hardest hit. The linkages between western Europe and emerging European banking systems make the region particularly vulnerable. The paper tries to present some financial policy measures regarding banking sector for stimulating credit growth in the Europe and especially, in the Central and Eastern European Countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture is no longer the main sector in the economy of rural Europe. Based on a comparative analysis of nine upland areas from five different countries (Scotland, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Spain), this article argues that, contrary to the claims of most social science work on ‘rural restructuring’, the decline of agriculture in the rural economy should be understood from a long-term perspective and in relation to European industrialization, rather than as a recent process linked to postmodern dynamics. In fact, widely diverging paths of rural change during industrialization similarly imply occupational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]