Shining a spotlight on small rural businesses: How does their performance compare with urban?
By J. Phillipson, P. Tiwasing, Matthew Gorton, Sara Maioli, Robert Newbery, R. Turner. Journal of Rural Studies, 2019
117 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Rural enterprises play an important economic role, contributing to national prosperity and wellbeing but are often a blind spot within rural development and wider economic policies and evidence. This paper presents an urban-rural analysis of a large scale survey of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). It applies Propensity Score Matching to allow for an assessment of the effects of rurality on business performance. Results show that England's rural firms have similar levels of turnover to their urban counterparts, but are more likely to report a profit. The analysis also reveals rural firms to be significantly stronger exporters of goods and services and to have goods or services suitable for exporting. However, there are some weaknesses and obstacles to business success that concern significantly more rural than urban firms, that vary with the rurality of local districts, and which require the attention of policy makers and support providers seeking to achieve spatially-balanced and more equitable economic development.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Management of Technology and Innovation, Urban Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0270da71f3aa9068ab2b9fcd37f0e70861f6d916
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Citations in the corpus
- The COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Implications for Rural Economies (2020, background): “In the UK, approximately 10 percent of rural firms import or export internationally, with similar proportions of rural and urban firms exporting to the EU and non-EU [14].”