Rural enterprises may suffer from poorer access to external finance and fewer options, due to potentially long distances to suppliers and the market. Their performance may be impeded due to limited access to external finance.
Employing the Longitudinal Small Business Survey 2015-2019 for firms in England located outside of London, the first part of this project considers whether firms’ use of external finance varies across, and within, urban and rural locations, and explores its impacts on business growth. The second considers demand for external finance of rural and urban businesses, discouraged borrowing and rejection decisions made by financial providers once firms had applied.
Formally a Research Fellow at NICRE and at the Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI), I am now an Associate Fellow, having joined London Metropolitan University as a Lecturer in Finance in September 2023. I remain involved with NICRE through my work analysing data from the State of Rural Enterprise Survey and other collaborations.
I hold a PhD in Development Economics from the Ruhr-University Bochum. My previous research focused on the role of public expenditure and financial systems in economic development. My work included the role of subsidies on agricultural productivity, impact of finance on agricultural productivity and small businesses’ growth, monetary theory of financial underdevelopment, and the economics of financial cooperatives. I mainly use economic modelling and applied econometric methods in my research. Current research interests concern agricultural environmental practices and farm productivity, and impact of balance of payment on inflation.
I’m Deputy Director of NICRE and Professor of Marketing at Newcastle University Business School. My research on rural business began with a PhD on the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises in rural England. For the last twenty years, I have worked at Newcastle University. I have been involved in several projects related to rural enterprises, food supply chains and food marketing. I teach marketing and collaborate extensively with colleagues in the Centre for Rural Economy. I am currently the coordinator of the EU Horizon 2020 project Strength2Food. This project considers the economic, social and environmental impacts of food quality schemes, public sector food procurement and short food supply chains.
I'm Director of NICRE and Professor of Rural Development at the Centre for Rural Economy, Newcastle University. I have research interests on: the development needs of rural economies and fishing communities; expertise exchange within rural land management; the integration of social and natural sciences in resource management. I'm an adviser to government through my membership of Defra Science Advisory Council Social Science Expert Group, Defra Rural Academic Panel, Scottish Government Rural Economy Action Group. I'm also a member of the Northern Uplands Leader Local Action Group. Previously, I was Assistant Director of the UK Research Council's Rural Economy and Land Use Programme.
Rural firms are more dependent on debt finance than urban firms, particularly overdrafts and credit cards. Equity finance is significantly less used by both rural and urban firms than other financing options. Rural firms are more likely to seek equity finance from family and friends.
Rural firms tend more often to seek external finance for equipment and vehicles than urban firms, and vice versa for staff training and development.
There are some regional variations, which fluctuate across years. For instance, in the North East and South West, rural businesses are more likely to use bank finance than urban businesses.
After controlling for firms’ and owners’ profiles, the amount of obtained external finance has a stronger impact on growth of rural firms than growth of urban firms.
I am a Research Associate in Quantitative Data Analysis at NICRE. My research interests relate to SMEs’ access to the financial market and their business growth. I have used quantitative research techniques to study how firm performance is constrained by financial resources and how firms’ perception of financial constraints relates to their credit-rationing experience in the financial market. My current work aims at understanding regional differences in access to external funding and performance in small firms. I’m completing my PhD in Business and Management at Warwick Business School which focuses on entrepreneurial finance.
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