In England, publicly supported advice to small firms is organized primarily through the Business Link (BL) network. Using the programme theory underlying this business support, we develop four propositions and test these empirically using data from a new survey of over 3000 English SMEs. We find...

This study examines two issues. First, we assess the reliability of employment data self-generated by respondents using a survey panel of 280 firms surveyed in 1999 and again in 2002. Our results show that there is a close correlation between self-generated and archival secondary data. Second,...