Within a comparatively short time there has emerged in Ireland an ad hoc ensemble of initiatives, funds and organisations pursuing aspects of rural development. As a result development policy is faced with a series of institutional and organisational questions (NESC, 1994: 115). These questions...

The Farm Improvement Programme (FIP) (Reg. 797/85) was introduced in Ireland in 1986 to replace the Farm Modernisation Scheme (FMS) (Dir. 159/92) of 1974-1985. Both schemes had similar objectives. Participants in each followed a grant aided farm development plan drawn up and operated in...

Small and medium sized enterprises operate within a complex web of links of various kinds. These may be distinguished in terms of their content (transactional, advisory, regulatory, social), "object" (other SMEs, third sector organisations, business services, local and national government),...

A region’s pattern of growth depends on its power to attract economic activities and the right blend of people to run them. This power depends on economic and social factors that may be combined into a variable which is referred to as the Image of a region and has been presented in...

Abstract The author assumes that globalization and its regional and local impacts have an important role in nowadays' economics. Paradoxically, challenges arising from the unification of the world have made the necessity for regional and local answers stronger. The transformation of the labor...

In the expansionary phase of the economy (1995-2007) and, particularly after the Euro introduction, credit to the business sector increased significantly in Europe. According to surveys of the EC-Flash Eurobarometer (2005), over 77% of SMEs claimed to have appropriate funding levels. A number of...

This paper studies the demand for mortgage debt in the Netherlands. Currently the size of this debt exceeds that of GDP, which makes is interesting to look at its determinants. We argue that the absence of a downpayment constraint is important and focus on two other issue. The first is the...

Firms locate in different areas for different reasons. However, some of them tend to move a new place in order to achieve alternative goals. For instance, the manufacturing survey in 2005 reflects that 30 per cent of the manufacturing firms in the Istanbul Metropolitan Area would like to...

Using firm level data on Italian and Turkish manufacturing industries we investigate the differences in survival patterns of foreign owned and domestic firms testing the hypothesis of foreign multinational enterprises (FMNEs) ?foot-loose? behavior (in line with seminal studies such as Görg and...

Up to now, the analyses of the current “Great Recession†have been mainly confined to the national and international scale leaving aside the differential effects of the crisis upon regions and smaller areas. Although the current crisis has a strong international and global flavor, it...