The authors examine factors that influence the propensity of a firm to take up external business support across four large English towns, using random effects nominal probit regression analysis to capture sector heterogeneity. The results suggest a strong positive association between the orientation of the firm towards growth and its propensity to use external business advice. ‘Push’ factors, including the existence of recruitment difficulties, are identified as key triggers to use business advice. These results provide valuable guidance to public policy organisations concerned with business development and competitiveness, and suggest a number of avenues for future research.

This paper proposes use of separable programming for selecting farm enterprises which are efficient in terms of expected income and income variance. An empirical application on a croplivestock farm in the Columbia Basin of Washington is presented. The effects of removing statistically insignificant covariance terms and the error introduced by the linear approximation are explored.

This article presents an empirical investigation into the role of peer groups on the intention to continue on to further study by students in full-time education at the age of 16. Estimates are derived via random effects nominal logit regression analysis and data from the Bradford Youth Cohort. Our results suggest that peer groups have a strong and significant impact on whether boys intend to stay on to post-compulsory education, but this is not so for girls. Furthermore, an array of factors appear to influence the intention decision for boys, whereas girls only appear to be influenced by their perceived ability.

No abstract

Development during approximately 200 years of agricultural activity in Alaska has been varied and generally inadequate. Four stages are here identified. During the period from Russian and early American colonization to the late 1880s production was largely for personal consumption. From 1898 to World War II federal intervention stimulated local commercial agriculture, and from the late 1940s to the late 1960s commercial production expanded. Since then a state- supported strategy to develop an export-based agriculture has been tried, but implementation has not been completed. Alaska remains a frontier which has yet to find a workable manner in which to implement a strategy for its agriculture.