Abstract
The thesis „Classification of rural municipalities according to development potential“ is focused on exploring factors influencing Czech’s rural municipalities development. It is typical for the Czech Republic, there is a huge amount of very small municipalities with less than a thousand inhabitants. 93 % of all municipalities in the Czech Republic have less than three thousands inhabitants.
Those are municipalities deemed as rural by most authors. Some of these municipalities are growing, some of them not.
This thesis tries to find what causes these disparities and how it is possible to change the development potential by some public policy action. Special attention is paid to social capital as phenomenon, which may be crucial for municipalities’ development potential by some previous researches.
Case studies are used as a research design. One hundred individual characteristics are examined in 18 selected municipalities from three different counties.
One half of these municipalities are growing once, second half are declining. There were found 10 indicators in realised research.
The index for municipality classification is created from them. Open composition of this index allows diversifications of public policy according to particular needs of individual municipalities.