We examine the effects of external and internal expenditure on research and development on the business performance of industrial agri-food enterprises. For this purpose, a data sample from the Encuesta de Estrategias Empresariales en Espan˜a (Survey of Business Strategies in Spain) was used, which includes information on more than 400 businesses over the period 2000-2008. The econometric analysis uses quantile regressions to address the vast asymmetry of the variables and to identify non-linear relationships. The results reveal interesting new findings on the impacts of R&D on the agri-food industry. The most evident, although not the most immediately apparent, relationship concerns the positive effects of external R&D on business performance. Internal R&D was also revealed to be an important way of enhancing the productivity of SMEs. In addition, the modernisation of the production process through investment in capital goods continues to be the main path to improve competitiveness. However, support was found neither for the inverse relationship, that is the most profitable firms are those that spend the most on R&D, nor for complementarity between external and internal R&D. The latter would imply that the bulk of Spanish agri-food firms have at most the capacity for only one type of R&D.
This investigation reviewed articles associated with sustainable rural tourism found on the Web of Science database over a 10-year span from 2009 to 2019. The 76 articles that were selected for their inclusion of the concept of sustainable rural tourism were listed in a comprehensive table, thereby revealing the research purpose, topics, detailed topics, research methods, and data source of the articles. The findings indicate that many papers on sustainable rural tourism were written from a holistic sustainability perspective without being biased towards any one of the environmental, economic, and social aspects. In the field of rural tourism, it is essential to pay attention to interactions in all aspects of the environment, economy, and society, and to analyze them overall. In addition, this study confirmed that efforts to understand sustainable rural tourism from the customer perspective have been increased since customer loyalty is considered important for sustainability. This study is significant in that, since it evaluated the knowledge status for the first time through systematic review and applied content analysis to academic literature related to sustainability in the sector of rural tourism, it can expand and deepen the knowledge and understanding of related topics and raise awareness of a new research direction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.