Lake Balaton: Development of a Unique Region in Transition

The area of Lake Balaton is one of the most familiar and, after the capital region, the second most frequented part of Hungary. No wonder, this region is an accentuated topic of Hungarian social, economic, and ecological researches. This paper aims to deal with its two crucial problems: first, this area does not compose a separate planning and statistical region, so it does not fit the NUTS system, which serves as base of development policy. On the other hand, this area needs to be handled as a complex, because, since the change of regime, it has had a decreasing development course and a lot of problems have arisen not only in local economy and, thus, in local society, but also in the context of environment.