ABSTRACT
The influence of rural locational characteristics for entrepreneurship varies considerably between processes: i.e. whilst some entrepreneurial processes are distinctly rural, others simply occur more or less incidentally in the countryside. The degree of embeddedness of each process within the local milieu varies significantly, with implications for the emerging enterprise strategies. As far as policy implementation is concerned, what should public policy be doing to develop entrepreneurship and develop rural areas. It is argued that European policies are required to foster entrepreneurship in rural peripheral areas, which sensitively distinguish between groups of countries as well as by types of rural areas and types of enterprises and not by country. Rurality and peripherality are treated as constitutive elements of each other in the sense that assessment of the rurality of a region necessarily takes into account the degree and the nature of its peripherality likewise; the peripherality of a region reflects its type of rurality.
