Ethnic entrepreneurship has become a popular concept in a modern multi-cultural society. This paper seeks to offer an overview of the potential of ethnic entrepreneurship for solving inter alia the structural unemployment problems of ethnic groups in cities. The present paper addresses in particular the critical success conditions for ethnic entrepreneurs. Based on a survey among ethnic entrepreneurs in the Amsterdam area, the paper sets out to identify empirically the driving forces for business success, such as education or the role of informal networks. The explanatory framework deployed for the identification of these qualitative success factors for distinct ethnic groups is based on a particular class of artificial intelligence methods, viz. rough set analysis. This multidimensional classification approach appears to be able to identify various important factors for the motivation and performance of ethnic enterprises.Pn954EMMTGV 1 New Horizons for Modern EntrepreneurshipIn the past decades we have witnessed an unprecedented dynamics in the functioning, organisation and location of business firms. We have seen the birth of global firms, but also the emergence of many promising small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). Large-scale concentration was accompanied by outsourcing at a world-wide scale. And ICT developments have made the locations of industrial plants and offices increasingly footloose (see Audretsch 1991, Carroll and Hannan 2000and Hayter 1997. The behaviour of the modern firm can no longer be understood on the basis of monodisciplinary research angles, but needs, in general, elements from organisational sociology, management science, economics, geography, and demography. The study of entrepeneurship is not only concerned with survival strategies and success conditions, but also with the birth and death of firms and the linkage patterns of firms with their local and regional environment (see e.g. Beesly and Hamilton 1994, Krugman 1995and Van Wissen 2000.There is apparently in our modern world an abundance of business opportunities, and entrepreneurs appear to be very keen in responding -with more or less success-to such new challenges. The SME sector is booming, especially in the area of ICT and biosciences. But, next to the creation of many new jobs in high-tech sectors of our economies, there is another segment which also exhibits a rapid evolution in both the developed and the developing world, viz. ethnic entrepreneurship (see Waldinger 1989). The trend towards a multi-cultural society reflected in particular in urban areas, has created the seedbed conditions for new entrepreneurial activities which find their origin in the specific socio-cultural habits of an ethnic segment of the population. In many cases, ethnic entrepreneurship may also be seen as a new form of self-employment, be it in the formal or informal sector. It is noteworthy that this phenomenon used to be rather rare in Europe, but we observe nowadays an upswing in the growth of ethnic SME activities in the European ci...

In the spirit of the devolution of public policy, we have recently witnessed an increasing popularity of decentralised forms of decision-making in urban land-use policy, in which both local (or regional) authorities and the private sector play a more prominent joint role in the preparation and implementation of urban development projects. The paper describes the pathway to a more institutional multi-actor mode of urban land-use and revitalisation projects within the framework of deregulated land markets and maps out various relevant aspects of competitive land use. In particular, an attempt is made to identify the crucial 'drivers' of this complex decision-making process in an urban context, against the background of revitalisation objectives for modern cities. The literature suggests, in particular, that the institutional constellation, the nancial viability and the presence of spatial externalities may act as critical factors for public-private partnerships. This proposition is tested in the paper by means of a comparative study on nine carefully selected urban development projects-more speci cally, nine types of public-private partnerships-in The Netherlands. After the design of a systematic database on these projects, a particular type of qualitative fuzzy classi cation analysis originating from arti cial intelligence, known as rough set analysis, is deployed to assess and identify the most important factors that are responsible for successes and failures of recent development plans in Dutch cities. This approach allows us to pinpoint the most critical policy variables.

This paper aims to examine the performance conditions of ethnic (migrant) entrepreneurs in a modem economy. After a broad overview of key issues, an analytical tool from marketing theory is proposed, based on 5 P's (product, price, place, personnel and promotion). Next, an empirical application is presented, in which results from an in-depth interview study on Moroccan entrepreneurs in Amsterdam are discussed. Given the linguistic and qualitative information in our data base, two recently developed pattem recognition methods for categorised information, viz. apriori and rough set methods, are deployed in order to derive meaningfùl association and classification rules which are helpful to identify conditional success or performance rules. Acknowledgement

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Pesticide use in agriculture poses several risks to both human health and non-target agro-ecosystems. Due to lack of information on the monetary value of reducing pesticide risks, it is difficult to perform an economic analysis that addresses social efficiency of policy and draws conclusions about the appropriate degree of regulation. The aim of the current paper is to present a critical overview of the empirical literature on pesticide risk valuation that provides disaggregate willingness-to-pay estimates (WTPs) of pesticide risks reduction. Recent multidimensional classification methods, such as coined decision tree analysis, are used in a comparative approach as tools for explaining the differences in empirical research findings. The analysis shows that the magnitude of WTPs is related to both the valuation technique and to the data available from biomedical and eco-toxicological literature. It also shows that WTP estimates of pesticide risks cannot be simply averaged over several empirical studies. The order of magnitude of a WTP estimate is, in fact, related to the specific type of risk and to the nature of the risk scenario considered, as well to lay people's subjective perception of risks.

An approach is introduced to combine survey data with multi-agent simulation models of consumer behaviour to study the diffusion process of organic food consumption. This methodology is based on rough set theory, which is able to translate survey data into behavioural rules. The topic of rule induction has been extensively investigated in other fields and in particular in learning machine, where several efficient algorithms have been proposed. However, the peculiarity of the rough set approach is that the inconsistencies in a data set about consumer behaviour are not aggregated or corrected since lower and upper approximation are computed. Thus, we expect that rough sets theory is suitable to extract knowledge in the form of rules within a consistent theoretical framework of consumer behaviour.

Nijkamp P., Rossi E. and Vindigni G. (2004) Ecological footprints in plural: a meta-analytic comparison of empirical results, Regional Studies38, 747-765. The concept of an ecological footprint is intriguing and has prompted an avalanche of theoretical and applied research. In recent publications both the scientific basis and the policy relevance of this concept have been given ample attention, while also much empirical work has been undertaken to assess the value of the ecological footprint in different regions or countries of the world. The paper starts with a concise critical overview of the current discussion on ecological footprints. Its main aim, however, is to provide a meta-analytic assessment and interpretation of the various empirical findings in the recent literature that offer estimated values or ranges of the ecological footprint indicator. The sensitivity of ecological footprints for the stringent assumptions made in the calculation schemes is investigated using frequency analyses, cross- tabulation methods and decision-tree induction methods (a recent technique based on pattern recognition methods). The results show that methodological choice, geographical scales and year of data collection offer a significant explanation for variations in results. The paper concludes with some suggestions for further research. Nijkamp P., Rossi E. et Vindigni G. (2004) Des traces écologiques au pluriel: une comparaison méta- analytique des résultats empiriques, Regional Studies38, 747-765. La notion de traces écologiques est fascinante et a provoqué un flot de recherches fondamentale et appliquée. Dans des revues récentes on a prêté une attention particulière à la base scientifique de cette notion et à son importance pour la politique, alors que beaucoup de travail empirique a été fait aussi afin d'évaluer les traces écologiques dans diverses régions et dans de différents pays du monde. Dans un premier temps, cet article cherche à donner une vue d'ensemble critique et concise du débat actuel sur la notion de traces écologiques. Cependant, son but principal est de fournir une évaluation et une interprétation méta-analytiques des différentes preuves empiriques que l'on peut trouver dans la documentation récente et qui fournissent des estimations ou des approximations de l'indice des traces écologiques. La sensibilité des valeurs des traces écologiques pour ce qui est des suppositions rigoureuses faites dans les calculs sont examinées à partir des analyses de fréquences, des données croisées, et des méthodes d'induction par arbres de décisions (une technique récente fondée sur des méthodes d'identification de configuration). Les résultats laissent voir que le choix méthodologique, l'échelle géographique, et la collecte des données en fonction de l'an, fournissent une explication riche des variations des résultats. L'article conclut par proposer des recherches futures. Nijkamp P., Rossi E. und Vindigni G. (2004) Ökologische Fußspuren überall: ein meta-analytischer Vergleich empirischer Ergebnisse, Regional Studies38, ...

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