The establishment of the Department for agricultural economics and village sociology was conditioned by the predetermined social happenings in these regions and by the needs of specific agrarian economic research. During 1968, within the framework of the Institute activity founded was special Section for economy and planning of agriculture.
Immediately following the establishment the coworkers, with the ongoing work on different plans and programs, initiated the systematic macro-economic research of the Adriatic agriculture. In that framework, together with the Department for agricultural economy at the Agricultural college in Zemun, was organized a survey that encompassed 2.838 or 1% of the agricultural homesteads on the entire Mediterranean region in Croatia. The content of that study is best evident from the results of the research:
In this way, for the first time in our agrarian economic researches was offered a complex view of the production-economic and demographically sociological problematics of individual management on the entire Mediterranean region of Croatia.
The second more significant research project, as a continuance of the previous one, came from the collaboration with FAO and the Institutes initiative, under the name "Economic-Social problematics of the village population in the Mediterranean region of Croatia". In this project, in which the Institute was responsible for the total research, cooperated many agrarian-economic and sociological institutes. The research entailed the following:
Previous research suggested significant changes in the agriculture and the villages and that the problematics of the village management is very complicated.
Further research on this topic was focused on the region of Dalmatia by the project: "Socio-economic changes in agriculture and the village". This type of research is of continuous character and is performed every five years. The goal of this research is scientific knowledge concerning the complex socio-economic changes in the agriculture and the villages, the confirmation and follow up of movement and the factors that cause it, observation of consequences concerning the determination of effective measures of the agrarian and socio-economic politics that would have to direct those movements in the sense of developing agricultural production, and general conditions of life in the village sphere.
Besides these research projects made out are individual studies for other narrow regions, most often in the framework of activity in combination with other Departments, with the goal of advancing and increasing the production of this region.