Local development initiatives in the spatial economy

This chapter is about the concept of local economic development with focus on some Hungarian examples. We know that local economic development should be realized bottom-up, but sometimes the local population and local businesses face various difficulties while they intend to encourage local developments even if they know the strengths and weaknesses of the settlement/region the best. However, this paper attempts to introduce some concrete examples for local economic development from the Hungarian rural micro-regions, especially from the field of local currencies/complementary money. Such cases may serve as samples for other Central-Eastern-European regions where the bottom-up approach also represents a new direction in economic development strategies and the local population is committed to the development of local economy and society.