Housing, Regeneration and Community Asset Transfer

Community asset transfer enables local groups to own or manage a government owned facility and/or related services. For critics, it is merely an extension of roll-back neoliberalism, permitting the state to withdraw from welfare and transfer risk from local government to ill-defined communities. The paper uses quantitative and case study data from Northern Ireland to demonstrate its transformative potential by challenging the notion of private property rights, enabling communities to accumulate and endanger forms of cooperative consumption. It concludes by highlighting the implications for more progressive forms of social economics in relation to public and private markets and government sponsorship of its own development.

Desperately Seeking Finance? The Demand for Finance by Women Owned and Led Businesses

The study reported here addresses some issues on gender, entrepreneurship and finance that have been identified as problematic in the literature. For example, much of the research to date is based on the assumption of entrepreneurship as male entrepreneurship; few studies have controlled for structural characteristics that may impact on the relationship between owner gender and a venture's ability to raise finance; and women are less likely than men to seek growth and external financing. Through the conduct of in-depth semi-structured interviews, an attempt has been made to give `voice' to women's intrinsically interesting experiences as the enactment of a situated practice, and not just in comparison with the assumed norm of male entrepreneurial activity. The findings suggest that when variables such as individual and firm characteristics are controlled for, generalizations found in the literature may not be supported. Further, the paper highlights that neither women entrepreneurs nor their businesses are homogeneous in nature and that greater heterogeneity in the study of female entrepreneurship in general, and access to finance in particular, is required.

Impact of Government Intervention on Employment Change and Plant Closure in Northern Ireland, 1983-97

Harris R. and Trainor M. (2007) Impact of government intervention on employment change and plant closure in Northern Ireland, 1983-97, Regional Studies 41, 51-63. Financial assistance to manufacturing industry is an important element of the industrial development policy in Northern Ireland. This paper uses the individual plant-level records of the Annual Respondents Database (ARD) for the Northern Ireland manufacturing sector (1983-97) matched to the plant-level details of financial support provided by the Industrial Development Board to examine the effect of selective financial assistance (SFA) on employment change and plant closure. It is found that SFA concentrated on protecting existing, rather than new, enterprises in terms of employment change. Using a hazard model, it is found that the receipt of SFA significantly reduced the probability of plant closure by, on average, between 15 and 24%.