Economics & Sociology

This article attempts to identify a relation between several local development factors and localization of agricultural problem areas in Poland, which include areas with limited potential for proper agricultural production, i.e., adverse soil and climatic conditions, severe soil degradation processes and fragmented structure of land. Such conditions consequently lead to low competitiveness of farms located there as well as bad demographic structure, depopulation and peripheral developmental position of the gminas. To assess levels of development, 6 detailed measures are constructed, using Hellwig’s synthetic measure. The final measure, grouping 17 variables, presents spatial distribution of the level of socio-economic development of selected 73 most problem gminas in Poland.