Background and Purpose
○Population aging and decreases are very typical and general in rural villages. Despite the circumstances, however, the villages are showing new changes that are much more diverse than in the past. To examine the current status of rural changes in detail and respond to them appropriately, continual and dynamic monitoring of changes in the village unit is necessary.

○This study aims to survey Korea’s representative rural villages selected as a panel for annual monitoring of their changes and suggest rural policy directions through an analysis and in-depth study of the survey results. Although our survey focuses on rural villages, they, as the smallest residential sites of rural areas, can contribute to providing materials that will be the basis of rural policy in the medium and long term by showing the present characteristics of and changes in the areas.

Research Methodology
○This study is a ten-year project, and 2022 is the third year. We conducted a basic panel survey by maintaining the main frame of the first- and second-year surveys but complementing them, and analyzed the current state of rural villages based on the survey results. Also, we carried out a separate in-depth study to examine the characteristics of changes in the villages in terms of the diversification of economic activities. We interviewed the heads of 103 panel villages by using a structured questionnaire and visited them for observation. We surveyed the residents of 23 villages related to the topic of the in-depth study, and also visited case villages (other than the panel villages) that show the characteristics of the diversification of rural economic activities.

(For more information, please refer to the report.)