The New Dimension of Social Inequality: The Agricultural Land Use Structure and the Development Level of Settlements

Abstract

The structure of land ownership and land use changed significantly after the fall of the communist regime in most CEE countries. The goal of this paper is to present a unique analysis of the highly concentrated Hungarian land system and model spatial differences. Using settlements as observation units, this research proposes a methodology to include data on land of all individual and corporate farms. First, according to the dominant farm size, we classified the farms into six types of land use structures, applying latent profile analysis. Then, we studied the distribution of their geographical location. We examined the statistical relationship between land ownership structure and the economic, social, and infrastructural characteristics and development level of settlements. One of the unexpected results of the research is that the dominance of large farms is mostly related to the higher values of the development indicators of the settlements.