The authors examine the extent to which there are geographical variations in transport costs for manufacturing firms in Great Britain. A new methodology is adopted which provides important new insights and which avoids many of the limitations of earlier work. The research presents a new index of...

Although there have been many initiatives designed to regenerate relatively run-down and deprived parts of major urban areas, there have been surprisingly few attempts to value their benefits. This article presents the findings of research that has sought to value the benefits of urban...

This article reports recent research that has assessed the achievements of one of the most extensive area-based initiatives (ABIs) that has ever been adopted in England-namely, the Single Regeneration Budget. This research has sought to ascertain whether, at least in relation to the findings...

The paper presents and discusses new evidence on the nature and causes of the urban-rural shift of business activity and employment in England, derived from a matched pairs survey of over 1000 manufacturing and service businesses in remote rural, accessible rural and urban settlements. It...

Greater levels of economic integration within Europe will bring more intense competition, not least for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This paper identifies the key factors in the SME location decision from a survey of almost 1400 companies. The most important factor was the...

During the 1980s and the 1990s there were a number of policy initiatives designed to tackle the problems of the urban areas in the UK. By the early 1990s these initiatives represented the commitment of over £1 billion of public expenditure each year. The initiatives encompassed 'area'-based...

During the past 25 years, there has been an extensive use of Area Based Initiatives (ABIs) to regenerate run-down areas in many countries. However, despite their increased popularity, evidence on their success in helping to turn around depressed areas remains elusive. The evidence base has been...

This paper employs a unique dataset to analyse the retail rental levels of 1108 retail tenants in 148 UK regional shopping malls. The dataset integrates information regarding the characteristics of the shopping centre, the individual retailer, the brand, the individual unit occupied, the tenancy...

The concept of industrial clusters has attracted much attention during the past decade, both as descriptive of an increasingly important phenomenon and as a basis for effective public intervention in the economies of lagging city-regions. However, there is much ambiguity in the way in which this...