Purpose – This paper seeks to show that capital subsidies are used as instruments of long‐term corporate strategy. Previous research indicates that capital subsidies do not improve firm performance, as this is reflected by measures of productivity growth or by financial measures of...

The ISO 9000 scheme has been reproved for being a paper driven process with little if no impact on firm performance. As international scientific literature indicates a wide range of factors leading to the adoption of the ISO 9000 schemes, the impact of this adoption should be viewed and examined...

Purpose – This work sets out to explore the effects of ISO 9001 on productive efficiency of firms. Design/methodology/approach – A sample of 1,572 firms from three Greek manufacturing industries is used for empirical work. The firms are from the food and beverages industries, the machineries...

Assesses the job creation effects of capital subsidies provided to small and medium enterprises in rural and lagging areas. The proposed methodology takes account of extensive censoring of job creation among assisted rural firms, endogeneity of the capital stock change resultant from capital...

The present work provides an integrated view of rural entrepreneurship and sets the agenda for future research in the area. Rurality defines a territorially specific entrepreneurial milieu with distinct physical, social and economic characteristics. Location, natural resources and the landscape,...

A central question in strategic management is why some firms perform better than others. One approach to addressing this question empirically is to decompose the variance in firm-level profitability into firm, industry, location, and year components. Although it is well established that data...

The paper presents results from four surveys of rural businesses in mountainous and less‐favoured areas of Southern Europe. Institutional support to rural businesses is extensive and delivered through the traditional instruments of capital subsidies, training and assistance to financial and...

Farmers’ decision to adopt organic cultivation and create niche markets is their response to the changing notions of quality and the gradual abandonment of the productivist logic in agriculture. This decision is analyzed within a multi‐level social ecological context designed to account...

Capital subsidization is a widespread instrument of regional and industrial policy in Europe. A number of recent works have examined the influence of capital subsidization on the total factor productivity of recipient sectors and firms, and have provided strong evidence of neutral or even...