Development of Business Activities in Peripheral Parts of Rural Areas, Western Bohemia

Abstract The aim of this paper is to assess the development of business activities in the Czech countryside in the period from 2008 to the present and to show possible limitations and perspectives of this area. The research was conducted by analysing economic entities located in rural municipalities in the peripheral areas of Western Bohemia. The assessment is based on the use of the Public Database of the Czech Statistical Office (statistics on economic entities, number of economic entities, number of economic entities created in 2008–2020) and a dataset on economic entities defunct in 2008–2021 provided by the Czech Statistical Office. We have analysed the economic entities by geographical location, size of municipality and industry specification. We use analysis of variance to assess whether the population size of a municipality has a statistically significant effect on the number of economic entities per 100 residents of the municipality, and we use visualization cartographic methods, density maps and cartograms to assess spatial differentiation. We have found that the nature of business activities in the study area is changing along the lines of urban locations, but, due to a number of factors, many rural economic entities are in a more economically precarious position.