EU industrial policy and competitiveness in rural SMEs

The objective of this paper is to consider the impact of EU industrial policy for rural and peripheral areas. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) had dominated the rural policy agenda at the expense of other forms of industrial development policy. Rural areas are no longer dominated by agricultural employment and productivist farming, but they are a mosaic of economic activity that increasingly mirrors more urban areas. We therefore hypothesise that the EU policy framework reinforces certain economic disadvantages for rural locations at a time when the changing composition of rural economies offers the potential for new dynamics in local development.