Differentiating Rural Areas in Uzbekistan and Slovakia and their Classification

Abstract The characteristic of the concept “rural areas” is widely different, varying from country to country. Similarly, Uzbek rural areas quite differ from Slovak ones. However, in both countries there is not applied a concrete national typology for the classification of rural areas. Therefore, the main aim of the paper is to identify the differences between the rural areas in Uzbekistan and Slovakia and to classify them using the rural - urban typology based on OECD methodology. In the selected countries the rural areas are mainly identified by the number of population living in the rural local units. According to the results of the classification by using the OECD methodology, in Uzbekistan the significantly rural areas prevail whereas in Slovakia, the intermediate ones dominate. However, there is not a big difference in the share of rural population between predominantly rural areas and intermediate ones in the Slovak Republic. In contrast to Slovakia, the number of rural residents in the intermediate rural areas in Uzbekistan is about three times lower than rural population in predominantly rural areas. There is not a predominantly urban area according to this methodology in Uzbekistan, however in Slovakia, Bratislava is the only region considered as predominantly urban area where only 2.2% of rural population from the total population reside.