Rural southwest Scotland relies to an atypically large extent on its small firms. This research adopts a qualitative approach to explore and map the relationships of 12 rural SMEs in the service sector. Although formal networks are underdeveloped in rural southwest Scotland, business owners...

Small firms continue to experience difficulty accessing adequate finance from formal external sources, notwithstanding many and varied institutional and policy initiatives introduced to address this seemingly perennial problem. Underpinning research indicates that information asymmetry is the...