General equilibrium (GE) techniques have recently been used to simulate policy impacts for neighbouring or different rural areas, thus focussing on the important spatial aspect of such policies. A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) represents production, households, government, etc. in matrix form, while computable GE models introduce greater behavioural flexibility at the cost of parameterisation. Several SAM and CGE models have recently been built for rural regions, while others have tried to represent rural-urban linkages. This paper presents two SAM applications, and one current CGE approach. The first SAM was developed for the analysis of the economic impact of Objective 1 policy on six remote rural areas, including two in Greece. Six specific regional SAMs were used to quantify the growth-generation effects of EU policies and scenarios on these local economies. The second effort used a hybrid three-area SAM for two different rural areas and an adjacent city in Crete to assess the diffusion patterns of economic impacts generated by three types of CAP measure in one of the rural areas. A CGE example, from the ongoing TERA project, seeks to model the determinants of economic agglomeration, and will attempt to cope with rural/urban distance and environmental externalities. Advantages of the SAM approach include its simplicity and availability of data and software. Disadvantages include significant data needs, linear behaviour, no real modelling of growth (development) or price changes, and the fact that some policies apply to many sectors in unknown way. The CGE approach may overcome some of these problems.