Measuring the localness of household expenditure in a post-socialist rural periphery

Abstract

In recent years, rural development planning has increasingly focused on the commodification of local resources or the ‘localisation of rural economies’. However, there is a lack of research on how local economies work and what is the extent of local expenditure. In our analysis of more than 1,600 receipts collected in one month by 38 research participants from a Czech rural locality of Nejdek, we measure the rate of localness of their expenditures. The results show that only one quarter of expenditure was made in this locality and only 10% in the examined villages. In the case of food, more than half of the expenditure in this category was made in the locality, but more than 80% of it in local supermarkets operated by transnational retailers. Such patterns are given by the specifics of socialist agriculture and post-socialist economic restructuring and significantly reduce the potential for the economic localisation endeavour.