In the Balkans, investors operate within a devil’s circle

Promoting entrepreneurship is often viewed as a key component for generating growth in the transition economies of eastern Europe. Tim Vorley and Nick Williams write that tackling corruption has an important role in this process. Drawing on recent research in Bulgaria and Romania, they assess the challenges posed by corruption for entrepreneurs in the region, noting that the issue must be understood and tackled effectively if entrepreneurship is to have a positive and productive impact on national economies. Currently, investors cannot break out of a ‘devil’s circle’ in which they are forced to engage in corrupt practices themselves, if they are to get anything done

Distinguishing micro-businesses from SMEs: a systematic review of growth constraints

Purpose – Micro-businesses account for a large majority of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). However, they remain comparatively under-researched. This paper seeks to take stock of the extant literature on growth challenges, and to distinguish the growth constraints facing micro-business as a specific subset of SMEs from those facing larger SMEs. Design/methodology/approach – The study consists of a systematic review of 59 peer-reviewed articles on SME growth. Findings – Micro-businesses distinguish themselves from larger SMEs by being owner-manager entrepreneur (OME) centric and are constrained by a tendency to be growth-averse, underdeveloped capabilities in key business areas, underdeveloped OME capabilities, and often inadequate business support provision. Research limitations/implications – The use of keywords, search strings, and specific databases may have limited the number of papers identified as relevant by the review. However, the findings are valuable for understanding micro-businesses as a subset of SMEs, providing directions for future research and generating implications for policy to support the scaling up of micro-businesses. Originality/value – The review provides a renewed foundation for academic analysis of micro-business growth, highlighting how micro-businesses are distinct from larger SMEs. At present, no systematic literature review on this topic has previously been published and the study develops a number of theoretical and policy implications

Understanding the firm-level effects of regulation on the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent an important part of the UK economy. The impact of regulation on these firms is important to understand, especially amid frequent claims that SMEs are disproportionately affected by regulatory costs and that regulation may hamper business growth. We searched major databases for relevant empirical research on the firm-level effects of regulation on SME growth. This search found that there is still very little firm-level empirical evidence of the effects regulation has on SME growth. While cutting red tape and bureaucracy is broadly welcomed as beneficial for business growth, there is very little evidence demonstrating how or when it impacts on SME growth at a firm level. It is necessary to fully understand these effects in terms of their dynamic, direct and indirect influences in order to appreciate both the ways in which they may constrain but also facilitate SME growth. Without this understanding, well-intentioned attempts to support these firms and growth-oriented owner-managers and entrepreneurs may be doomed to failure

Recovery and resilience: How can innovation policy support the response

The coronavirus pandemic has affected many of the factors shaping the R & D and innovation landscape. Innovative businesses, including early stage companies, face running out of cash due to a lack of availability of external finance or funding, and parts of sectors face being wiped out by economic contraction. R & D projects have hit the buffers due to operational restrictions. At the same time, however, there have been some potential positive effects. Businesses have had to innovate rapidly to adapt to new circumstances, resulting in business model changes and investment in new technologies, especially digital solutions. With digitally-enabled solutions becoming in demand, technology companies have made their products freely available. This chapter reviews these changes and discusses the potential impacts of COVID-19 going forward. In this context, the chapter looks at how policies and programmes could be used to best respond to the crisis in ways that may assist with longer-term competitiveness, and the challenges and opportunities that could shape a recovery that places innovation at its centre. It does this through the lens of priorities related to the 2.4% R & D target, supporting innovative companies, and improving innovation diffusion

Addressing policy challenges for more sustainable local-global food chains : policy frameworks and possible food ‘futures’

© 2016 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons by Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).The article considers how policy can address the local–global within a wider commitment to food sustainability and draws on research conducted for the EU-funded GLAMUR project (Global and local food assessment: a multidimensional performance-based approach). Case study data identifies four key policy challenges for policymakers. Addressing these challenges in order to make links between current (and future) more sustainable food policy involves three phases. The first identifies processes of engagement in three spheres (public policy, the market and civil society); the second identifies points of engagement offered by existing policy initiatives at global, EU, national and sub-national policy levels; and the third builds scenarios as possible “food futures”, used to illustrate how the project’s findings could impact on the “bigger policy picture” along the local–global continuum. Connections are made between the policy frameworks, as processes and points of engagement for food policy, and the food “futures”. It is suggested that the findings can help support policymakers as they consider the effects and value of using multi-criteria interventions.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Financing small and innovative firms during Covid-19

Previous research on the financing of smaller innovative firms has established that being small per se creates problems in accessing finance, but being small and innovative adds another layer of difficulty. This new research explicitly questions whether the Covid-19 crisis has added to the debt access problems of an already disadvantaged group of firms. Using a unique Covid-19 period dataset of 9,000 UK SMEs, we find that the most innovative firms had the highest demand for loans during the Covid-19 crisis and evidence that those firms trying to introduce new products and services faced more severe borrowing constraints. As the vast majority of Covid-19 loans in the UK were government guaranteed, we also find that several classes of innovative firms found it more difficult to access government supported loans. It was also not the case that those most impacted by the crisis had the most privileged access to government loan schemes despite a greater need for liquidity. These findings have potential implications for financing innovative firms in the post-Covid-19 world, such as proposing a specific innovation loan guarantee scheme with higher than conventional guarantee rates

The 'imaginary' challenge of remaking subnational governance: Regional identity and contested city-region-building in the UK

With the structuring of subnational governance driven primarily by economic goals, an issue that has become increasingly overlooked is that of identity. Drawing on interviews with stakeholders from the Sheffield City Region, the paper builds on Jones and Woods’ framework of 2013 of ‘material’ and ‘imagined’ coherence, demonstrating the ‘imaginary’ challenge of remaking subnational governance in the context of rescaling from regions to city-regions. It shows that historical regional identities can persist even in the absence of associated material components of governance, and that rescaling can create asymmetries between material and imagined coherence, resulting in competing imaginaries that hinder the new subnational arrangements