This paper presents a rapid assessment of current and likely future impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak on rural economies given their socio-economic characteristics. Drawing principally on current evidence for the UK, as well as lessons from the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak and the 2007/8 financial crises, it outlines the likely key demand and supply effects, paying attention to the situation for agriculture as well as discussing the implications for rural communities. A distinction is made between the effects on businesses offering goods and services for out-of-home as opposed to in-home consumption. Gendered dimensions are also noted as likely business and household strategies for coping and adaptation. The paper concludes with a brief mapping of a research agenda for studying the longer-term effects of COVID-19 on rural economies.
#1Zunyou Wu(CCDC: Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention)H-Index: 56
#2Jennifer M. McGoogan(CCDC: Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention)H-Index: 17
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention recently published the largest case series to date of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in mainland China (72 314 cases, updated through February 11, 2020). This Viewpoint summarizes key findings from this report and discusses emerging understanding of and lessons from the COVID-19 epidemic.
Last. Roger Turner(Newcastle University)H-Index: 4
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Abstract Rural enterprises play an important economic role, contributing to national prosperity and wellbeing but are often a blind spot within rural development and wider economic policies and evidence. This paper presents an urban-rural analysis of a large scale survey of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). It applies Propensity Score Matching to allow for an assessment of the effects of rurality on business performance. Results show that England's rural firms have similar levels of tur...
In rural UK, businesses are often isolated and have much to gain from healthy networks, yet studies show that many rural business owners fail to network effectively. Information communications technologies offer new ways to network that might benefit rural businesses by expanding their reach. This study looked at online and face-to-face networking behaviour among rural micro-enterprises in Scotland in relation to the development of bonding and bridging social capital. Given the challenges of rem...
Abstract The economic importance of the private sector, such as the contribution of businesses to Gross Domestic Product or to employment creation, is well recognised in research and policy. In the context of significant economic, social and environmental changes such as the economic downturn, public spending cuts, an ageing population and climate change, the broader social and environmental contributions of the private sector to local resilience have begun to be recognised by researchers and po...
Last. Mike Cushman(LSE: London School of Economics and Political Science)H-Index: 11
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This paper considers implications for the English voluntary sector of recent shifts in the terms of engagement with the state following rapid political and policy changes under the UK Coalition government. It explores how ideas of what constitutes the voluntary sector are being reconstructed in policy and practical settings, examining processes contributing to re-shaping the voluntary sector's conception of itself and beliefs about legitimate activities and aspirations. It draws on theories of i...
#1Giulia Faggio(University of Westminster)H-Index: 12
#2Olmo Silva(LSE: London School of Economics and Political Science)H-Index: 17
We study the link between self-employment and some salient aspects of entrepreneurship – namely business creation and innovation – in urban and rural labour markets. In order to do so, we combine individual and firm-level data for Britain aggregated at the Travel-to-Work Area level. We find that a higher incidence of self-employment positively and strongly correlates with business creation and innovation in urban areas, but not in rural areas. We also document that more rural than urban workers ...
We study the impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic on short- and medium-term economic performance in Sweden. The pandemic was one of the severest and deadliest pandemics in human history, but it has hitherto received only scant attention in the economic literature – despite representing an unparalleled labour supply shock. In this paper, we exploit seemingly exogenous variation in incidence rates between Swedish regions to estimate the impact of the pandemic. The pandemic led to a significant in...
Using the EU-SILC database (2005--06) for twenty-four European countries, this article develops a comparative perspective on labor market situations of women and mothers with very young children in relation to labor market institutions and policies (especially childcare and leave schemes). Using multilevel multinomial logit models, our results show firstly the heterogeneity of national arrangements of women's labor market integration in Europe (including among new member states). Secondly, our r...
Recent public policies increasingly emphasize the role of communities in service co-production. Collaboration between the state and the public is frequently associated with social enterprise activities. However, the assumption that social enterprises can be successfully built and developed in remote and rural areas might be faulty. Current policy does not recognize contextual factors relating to rural social enterprise development. Drawing on a qualitative study in the Highlands of Scotland the ...
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to challenge calls for a monolithic rural home‐based business (HBB) sector and instead propose meaningful sub‐sectors of HBB that fit within contemporary rural economic development theory. This informs business support and policy objectives.Design/methodology/approach – Survey analysis of rural microbusinesses in the North East of England compares home‐based and other rural microbusinesses to illustrate their defining characteristics. Case study interviews ...
#2Frank Boons(University of Manchester)H-Index: 28
Last. Bob Doherty(Ebor: University of York)H-Index: 18
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Abstract null null In the emergent literature, food ‘on-the-go’ (OTG) tends to be addressed as a consumption trend. However, considering that it entails significant amounts of packaging and food waste and has seen enormous growth in the UK since the 1990s, it is not sufficiently understood how OTG emerged as a sector. Conceptualising OTG as a provisioning practice and adopting a ‘Learning History’ approach, we aggregate journalistic columns and expert interviews into lineages that explain sector...
Objective null Recently, China has experienced a considerable influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the local people’s health and economy. Hence, the current research aims to investigate the psychological and socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 on rural communities in the Sichuan Province of China. null Methods null A total of 499 participants (village representatives of Sichuan Province) were approached to partake in a cross-sectional online survey and share their experience regarding the ongoing ...
Last. Faizi Weqar(AMU: Aligarh Muslim University)H-Index: 2
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The spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had a significant impact on business and economies globally. This paper aims to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on firm performance in China...
The study investigated the organisational resilience (OR) levels of rural non-profit organisations (RNPOs) in the areas of activity or non-activity to adapt under the global uncertainty conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, in April/May 2020, the managers of 35 RNPOs located in Poland were queried. The Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient (ρS), the coefficient of determination (R2) and a transformation coefficient (d) were primarily used to verify the hypotheses and interpret the ...
Last. Luca Romagnoli(UNIMOL: University of Molise)H-Index: 5
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Abstract null null The spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy, in the period March-May 2020, quickly triggered a deep crisis, causing an immediate economic slowdown and consequently a strong contraction in domestic demand and trade. The food supply chain faced severe difficulties, although its anti-cyclical nature allowed for greater resilience compared to other economic sectors. In this framework of ongoing uncertainty, it is important to understand the response of farms to the crisis, and th...
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating socio-economic consequences for millions of people, households and communities worldwide. Towards containing the spread of the pandemic, lo...
Rural areas still suffer from a lack of sustainable development, and the diversification of farms may be a step in the right direction. The paper provides a detailed picture of the diversification of Sicilian farms into tourism services. Specifically, we propose a simple indicator of localization intensity of agritourism farms and explore their spatial distribution at municipality level. Our study highlights that Sicilian farms rarely diversify into tourism services, despite being situated in at...
Purpose: This study intends to explore the impact of occupation and income on informal migrants in the face of COVID-19 induced lockdown in Bangladesh and their coping strategies to survive the pandemic situation Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted a qualitative research design in which four urban areas were chosen purposively from various parts of Dhaka city The authors conducted 21 semi-structured in-depth interviews, four FGDs and eight months over participant observation for achie...