The Deliverable 3.2 of the SCARLED project investigates the structures and recent evolution of population, income, labour market and agriculture in rural areas of the new EU Member States (NMS) by means of cartographic and statistical analysis, based on the comprehensive NUTS3 (NUTS2) database compiled in Deliverable 3.1. It is intended to provide background information for subsequent SCARLED analyses which will research into structural changes in agriculture and rural livelihoods in several regions in more detail. Based on the OECD classification, rural areas in the NMS encompass more than 90% of the NUTS3 regions with more than 80% of total population. In the NMS of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), transition implicated increasing interregional disparities in income and employment, declassing many of the rural areas to looser regions with poor economic performance, high unemployment and population decrease, whereas large cities and their surrounding rural areas turned out to be the winners of transition. There are no indications that market forces will regulate these imbalances over time as originally supposed by the central governments. Although these tendencies are observable in all CEE countries, the dimensions of particular problems in rural areas are considerably varying within and across countries. Malta and Cyprus are in comparison with the CEE countries generally performing much better. This stresses the well-known issue that rural development measures have to be tailored to the specific regional conditions. This holds also for sectoral agricultural policies since the duality of the farm sector in CEE requires a differentiated policy support for structural adjustment.