A concept of multifunctional rural development cannot be identified exclusively with creating new jobs. Multifunctional character is a wider notion including among others local development, entrepreneurship, long-term planning, diversification of agriculture and improvement of demographic resources. Problems of multifunctional rural development must be therefore treated as a complex issue. The work presents results of research on diversification of multifunctional rural development in the świętokrzyskie province conducted in 97 communes.The level of multifunctional development of the studied objects was presented as a synthetic index of development established by Hellwig, computed on the basis of 15 variables characterizing multifunctional character. The value of computed synthetic index fell within the range of 0.3055 (Masłów commune) and -0.0155 (Blizyn commune). It must be mentioned that the index has been construed in such a way that it value is between 0 and 1. In some cases, e.g. a considerable difference in development of some objects, its value may assume values less than 0.A classification of the studied communes was also made due to the level of their multifunctional character. The first class of communes with the highest level of multifunctional development includes 10 communes, the second class with medium development level - 36 communes ...
Multifunctional rural development is a proven in many European countries way of improving standard of living of farming families. The term also describes a lifestyle, implies maintaining rural traditions without resigning from the conveniences of modern civilization. Developing rural areas in this manner means accomplishing multitude of diverse projects. Multifunctional rural development is not only siting non-agricultural enterprises in these areas, but also preserving the landscape, the environment and traditional rural culture. The paper describes how AHP - Analytic Hierarchy Process - has been applied to assess multifunctional rural development of 11 randomly chosen rural communes located in Małopolska Province. The way of accomplishing the required tasks has been examined from a fresh perspective and a novel manner, taking into account numerous factors and relations between them, of arriving at the planned goals has been proposed. Because of its complexity, the structure of the problem is presented hierarchically. Priorities (weights) of each component element of the structure has been estimated by comparing them one to another in pairs according to the 9-point Saaty scale. Determining the priorities of component elements allowed to rank the communes according to their multifunctionality. The conducted sensitivity analysis made it possible to dynamically change the ...
