ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the difficulties that rural enterprises face, and the strategies that they have adopted as regards conducting their businesses. The simplified idea of rural modernization in the Rostowian sense, according to which land reform provides a decisive boost to modernization in rural areas, resulting in the growth of food production, urbanization and industrialization. R. Scase takes a much more critical stance towards the socio-economic role of all forms of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) within the post-socialist countries. At the lower end of the continuum is the survival/small trading types of business, while at the top there is entrepreneurship. The difficulties in creating a viable and strong SME sector in most post-socialist countries are related mostly to the lack of coherent policy. The employment trends in the three Baltic countries have been quite different. Within consumer goods production, manufacturing of wood products has been almost the only sector, which has shown growth in both Latvia and Lithuania.
