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Entrepreneurship is widely recognised as a key determinant of economic growth, regional prosperity and sustainable development. Using a panel model with data from the value added tax register, this paper estimates spatial variation in small growing firms across 32 Scottish regions for the period 1998–2012. Results show there is considerable variation in small growing firms across Scottish regions and may be explained by demand, supply, policy, cultural factors and agglomeration benefits. Scotland has historically suffered from low levels of entrepreneurial activity; however, this paper provides relevant and timely findings into a form of entrepreneurial activity that until now has largely been overlooked.

The effectiveness of intra-regional job search is influenced by how far people are willing to travel to new employment. While much has been written on the commuting patterns of those in work, relatively little research has been carried out on how far unemployed job seekers are prepared to commute. This paper presents and tests a model of factors influencing the maximum time unemployed job seekers would be willing to travel to a potential new job. Significant effects are found for a range of personal and demographic characteristics, including gender, years of education, type of job, and location. The evidence suggests support for the spatial mismatch hypothesis and shows differing accessibility to employment opportunities for certain types of unemployed people. The findings also suggest that models of the trade-off between leisure and work time should fully include travel-to-work time as part of this trade-off

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This paper presents a model of mismatch unemployment in two local labour markets in Scotland. A total of seven possible sources of such unemployment are identified and examined within the context of a predominantly urban area and a mixed urban-rural area. These are contiguous travel-to-work-areas (TTWAs). The paper attempts to identify what causes recruitment difficulties and discusses the extent to which the problem is demand-induced. A survey of employer practices and attitudes is followed up by multiple regression analysis to determine the effect of these practices on vacancy duration. The analysis shows that there are certain recruitment practices and inherent characteristics of employers which result in job offers that are either unattractive or inaccessible to the unemployed. It is argued that design of policy for implementation at the local level needs to take account more explicitly of the demand side of the local labour market than has so far been evident in the UK approach to the skill mismatch issue.

The existing body of knowledge attributes to informal land transactions in sub-Saharan African cities observed problems in city neighbourhoods. Substantial resources, often backed by donor agencies, are therefore being spent in revamping bureaux and governmental bodies in a bid to solve the problems. This paper examines the economic impacts of this aspect of market intervention. Employing insights from rent-seeking theory, it estimates costs brought to bear on agents by government agencies' involvement in the urban land market of Accra, Ghana. The sum of these wasteful diversions of resources is found to explain a great deal of the haphazard developments that have come to characterise many neighbourhoods in the city. Market-led regulation emerges as the needed focus of future land policy and management strategy. Towards this, the paper calls for the removal of existing unwarranted market interventions and the reorganisation of responsible bureaux in ways that would induce them to operate efficiently.

IntroductionConventional labour-market research and policies have highlighted deficiencies in the skills and other supply-side characteristics of job seekers as major causes of difficulties in filling job vacancies and of unemployment. However, the importance of employer and vacancy characteristics in prolonging vacancy duration in local labour markets has been given less consideration. These need to be more fully considered in order to provide additional understanding of their causes so as to increase the speed of flow of job seekers into new employment and reduce the costs to employers of unfilled vacancies.One set of standard explanations for persistent unemployment has particularly focused on the supply side (CEC, 1994; OECD, 1994;. In the context of the United Kingdom the supply-side approach to improving international competitiveness is rooted in the argument that one of the fundamental economic constraints is an inflexible, lowskilled, low-mobility labour force, and that this represents a key supply-side constraint to economic growth which should be addressed through long-term investment in human capital (for example, DfEE, 1996a;1996b). However, while supply-side issues are important, after nearly two decades of supply-side-orientated labour-market policy in the United Kingdom, unemployment in many local labour markets remains high and persistent, and competitive models have had only partial success in explaining involuntary, cyclical, or structural unemployment (Manning, 1995).Supply-side policies such as the New Deal in the United Kingdom have been criticised for failure to take account of local demand-side conditions (Campbell and