Balint Csatdri

Abstract

The territory officially called the Great Hungarian Plain is typically the macroregion of Hungary, occupying 46% of the country's total area. The paper highlights some of its new regional conflicts which have arisen as a result of the current socio--economic change of regime. Most important environmental problems are as follows: the imbalance of the water-economy, the increasing amount of territories where soils are exposed to some danger, the functioning of the new land-use system based on agricul-tural privatization and the changing relationship between production and the natural environment.Owing to the change of regime, we have to face several new socio-economic conflicts, especially the decrease of industrial and agricultural production which is caused by the loss of the eastern markets. It is the main reason why the unemployment rate has become twice as high as the national average and why the income-creating ability of rural areas has decreased by half since 1990. As the new economic structure has been forming rather slowly, the main direction of social processes points towards pauper- ization.It is worth analyzing whether the East Central European regions of this kind are able to renew themselves on their own, to solve the task of modernization and to overcome their disadvantages within a reasonable period of time.

Keywords: Environment, socio-economic conflicts, unemployment, Great Hun-garian Plain

Balint Csatdri, Alfold Institute of the Research, Centre for Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 11-6001 Kecskemet, Rakoczi ut. 3, RO. Box 261, Hungary