ABSTRACT
The development of the peasant economy can be properly analyzed only within the broader context of the socioeconomic development of socialist Yugoslavia over the last three decades and against the background of the economy and social conditions inherited from the pre-Second World War period. Yugoslavia's postwar economic development has negated so large a role for agriculture in the country's economy. Through an extraordinary effort and an adequate economic policy, Yugoslavia has contrived to emerge from the backwardness for which the agrarian structure of her economy had been responsible. The most mobile component of the declining agricultural population during the postwar period has been the labor force. Apparently, the tendency has been for agriculture to be abandoned gradually, in phases. The "aging" of the labor force in agriculture has had a deleterious influence on agricultural production. Many farms have been left without any heirs who would stay on the land.
