Search

The development of a sustainable rural world must have an innovative agri-food industry as one of its bases. This article offers a comprehensive analysis of the main drivers of innovation by small and medium agri-food companies in Spain. A combined multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is performed to identify the key factors among 63 indicators in the domains of the technology-organisation-environmental approach. The results suggest an open field of research. Positively related to innovation are firm capacities and financial resources. Moreover, agri-food firms innovate in products, processes or marketing in order to increase sales, enter new markets, or increase the quality of their products. On the contrary, most of these firms did not innovate to reduce costs or time of response, meet regulatory compliance or maintain employment. Authorities should be aware that smaller and younger agri-food firms face more restrictions to innovate, and firms feel public policies could help to meet market demand as a driving force of innovation. On the contrary, essential objectives of regional development such as environmental compliance and maintaining employment seem to depend solely on public action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to external finance is a key challenge for the creation, survival and growth of SMEs. This article delves into the "weak funding" handicap of rural small firms (SEs): the access to bank financing and the substitutive role of trade credit for entrepreneurs in rural areas when they faced bank credit constraints. Considering SEs in Galicia (Spain), a paradigmatic case in Europe of rural areas in demographic decline with a strong impact of the Spanish sovereign and banking crisis of 2008-2012. There's evidence of firms in rural areas facing a differential negative flow of bank credit during the financial crisis, especially in the manufacturing and construction sectors, that dissipated afterwards. Then, using a panel data approach that considers the determinants of trade credit, the complementary and substitutive hypotheses are tested to estimate the impact of bank credit restrictions over trade credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The natural experiment provided by the opening of a section that completed the A8 motorway in Mariña de Lugo, a rural area in Galicia (Spain), offers an opportunity to identify whether spread or backwash effects in economic activity are observed. The new section directly affects only a small strip of the territory—where the transition from the inland rural areas to the more dynamic coastal area takes place. This allows us to test a separate dual inner‐coastal socio‐economic performance after the opening of the new road—an analysis that has rarely been performed for rural areas in developed countries. We study the impact over population growth, employment and business financial results, using the differences‐in‐differences approach. The results we obtain are consistent with the spread hypothesis for the nearest municipality to the new road section, while the spread effects did not disseminate to the neighbouring municipalities. These global results hide a different performance at the sector level, positive for transport and manufacturing companies, and negative for retail firms and hospitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The depopulation process of rural areas in Europe during the last decades is widespread. However, in many regions, this performance is largely an inheritance from past migration and the drag it causes in terms of an ageing population structure. Removing the inertial effects of past migration, we may find a much greater diversity in the current demographic dynamics of rural areas. We analyse the case of Galicia, a NUTS-2 region in Spain that represents a paradigmatic case of traditional emigration. We remove the drag from past migration to obtain the population performance of rural counties once the effects of that inertia were removed, and interpret the results. The analysis works as a descriptive tool: refined data help to identify which rural areas, however they continue to lose population, are being able to slow down or even revert the processes of depopulation inherited from the past. Finally, we explore possible explanations for such better performance, verifying that this is mainly related to key factors in regional planning and development such as the proximity to urban nodes and the quality of connections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]