Territorial development assessment in Latvia

Abstract

It is important for every country that its territory develops evenly and in a balanced way. In the European Union (EU), a special focus is placed on the development of rural territories, as predominantly rural regions in the EU represent 57% of the territory and 24% of the population. In Latvia, the development of rural territories depends on economic growth in the key industries for the rural areas-agriculture and forestry, and logging that contributed to 4.3% of GDP and employed 9.5% of the labour force in 2011. Therefore, the research aim is to perform an assessment of the administrative territories of Latvia. The research analysed the municipalities of Latvia in terms of population and change in the population as well as in terms of revenue and income and change in the revenue and income. The research found that in Latvia the best economic performance was demonstrated by the municipalities with a population in the range of 8-12 thousand. In the period 2004-2014, the number of residents decreased by more than 20% in 49 municipalities of Latvia. Such municipalities are located far away from the capital city, and poor economic performance indicators with a prevailing primary sector were typical of the municipalities. The municipalities with higher tax revenue had larger populations, which increased in the period of analysis, and such municipalities are located in the vicinity of Riga and high economic performance indicators were characteristic of them.

Welfare of dairy cows

“…In 2008, the proportion of cows tethered at least temporarily during winter in Europe was estimated to be between 20% in the lowlands and 80% in higher, marginal regions (Veissier et al, 2008). Also, more recent literature describes tethering as common practice and widespread throughout the EU, especially on smaller scale farms (Popescu et al, 2013;Nipers et al, 2016;Tarantola et al, 2016;Blanco-Penedo et al, 2020;Lora et al, 2020). However, in various countries, the use of tie-stall systems is declining compared to loose-housing systems (review in Barkema et al, 2015) and data are available, e.g.…”

“…In the countries that are high milk-producing, especially in the west and north of the EU, such as Germany, The Netherlands and Denmark, cubicle systems are used in the majority of dairy farms. In eastern EU-MSs, such as Poland (Winnicki and Jugowar, 2011), Romania (Popescu et al, 2013) and Latvia (Nipers et al, 2016), the adoption rates are likely to be lower, although increasing in number. However, official data are only available for some countries (Table 4).…”