In Tanzania and other developing countries entrepreneurship plays a vital role in the fight against poverty and unemployment. That’s why entrepreneurship should not be underestimated especially in rural areas where poverty is widespread. For instance, in Tanzania rural women entrepreneurs contribute significantly to economic development although their contribution has not been studied in any great depth. This research addressed the following research questions (1) what are the major characteristics of women entrepreneurs and their enterprises? (2) What are the types of income generating activities (IGAs) undertaken by rural women entrepreneurs?, (3) Do women access the traditional forms of capital or funding in starting and maintaining their businesses (i.e. credit unions, bank loans) and what is the role of finance institutions in financing women entrepreneurs?, (4) How do they measure their business success in entrepreneurial performance, and what contributions have they made to Tanzania?, (5) What are the barriers and/or obstacles that female entrepreneurs face in initiating and growth of IGAs entrepreneurial performance?, and (6) What cultural constraints does women’s participation in IGAs face? It is found that women entrepreneurs in Tanzania face a number of challenges compared to men. Even poverty in Tanzania is concentrated more in rural areas and is more wide spread among women than men, as it is in many underdeveloped countries. This has made women getting involved in different activities in the society, and plays a very big role in the informal sectors, waged labour and household production, although they are not included in development planning. Therefore it has been found that there has been very little in the extant literature that examined how women are disadvantaged by the male dominated environment in rural Africa; the main studies examine women’s entrepreneurial activities in urban Africa. Hence, this research examined the barriers to the success of women’s income generating activities in rural Tanzania from a cultural perspective. It looks into Tanzanian women’s place within their traditional culture from a feminist perspective and how this constrains entrepreneurial activity. Also this study uncovered the setbacks and developmental issues related to women’s entrepreneurship in relation to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Tanzania. The study was qualitative and adopted an ethnographic research strategy using in-depth-interviews and participant observation techniques to collect primary information from a sample of 24 participants: 20 rural women participating in income generating activities (IGAs) and interviewed 4 officials who were purposively selected. Women in rural areas still run undersized enterprises and most of their businesses are small individual enterprises (SIEs) and not SMEs. Women encounter distinct barriers like lack of financial support, lack of networks, lack of education, limited market, lack of access to MFIs, lack of education and knowledge of running a business and lack of governmental support were uncovered to be the problems in the study. Further cultural barriers were also identified where women still encounter discriminatory treatment in their communities due to their ascribed roles, constraining their entrepreneurial success. Cultural barriers have led them to fear performing entrepreneurial activities which interfere with their household chores, which has been among the major barriers hindering women from performing better in their entrepreneurial activities. Moreover, they lack time to access training and acquire skills on entrepreneurial performance, as well as lacking access to opportunities. Although women work hard, still their SIEs are under-sized with low profits and low growth. Women-owned businesses have limited achievement, causing them not to sustain their enterprises, due to the number of challenges facing them. Characteristics of an entrepreneur, moreover, were seen to differ according to the country; the characteristics in the developed economies are different from those in developing economies. Developed economies were seen to engage in entrepreneurship driven by pull factors, while developing economies were driven by push factors. The study surprisingly revealed lack of education to be one of the characteristics pushing women to enter into the entrepreneurial activities, as they had no other option for sustainability and this adds a new characteristic in the body of knowledge which was not found in the literature. Hence, policies and programmes for the support of women entrepreneurs need to begin with the diagnosis of the motives driving women entrepreneurs to a promising business prospect, aiming at strengthening the push factors, which will constitute a foundation for more practical and innovative entrepreneurial activities. The Tanzanian government should use its schemes to extend microcredit services to women through microcredit schemes like the Small Industries Development Organization (SIDO), women’s development funds and women’s banks. Broad outreach would promote poverty alleviation through the informal sectors which are pursued by the majority of Tanzanian rural women. Hence, a formulation of policies is needed to promote financial help to rural women entrepreneurs, which will be an opportunity to enhance women’s growth.

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Organisations managing recreational sites commonly need to understand the factors influencing visitation choices made by the public and the impact they have on the value of their sites. This need is particularly pertinent with an increasing societal reliance on cost benefit analysis for project appraisal. Whilst on-site visitor surveys can provide information on preferences and values, the potential to transfer findings to predict visitor numbers and values at unsurveyed sites provides an attractive policy option. Indeed, the demand for these benefit transfer methodologies is increasing as more Government emphasis is placed on evaluating the economic potential of rural outdoor recreation. This research concerns the development of benefit transfer models to estimate visitor numbers from outset zones to British Waterways and Forestry Commission sites. Employing a GIS, the research uses multilevel statistical modelling techniques to quantify the impacts of the proximity to competing recreation sites, resource accessibility and quality, and the characteristics of visiting populations. The models are constructed using visitor survey data and applied to unsurveyed sites, testing their use in benefit transfer. Methods are also developed that allow their output to be used to estimate the non-market value of the recreational opportunities afforded by the resources. The findings show some robust relationships determined visit patterns, with travel times from outset zones being a consistent predictor of visitor numbers. A range of other indicators were also significant including socio-demographic measures, site characteristics and substitute availability values. Nevertheless, when individual sites were compared, considerable variability was detected in the strength and direction of these relationships. The methodology developed explicitly addresses the frequently ignored spatial dimension of benefit transfer. Here the GIS provides the functionality to produce a range of measures of the underlying determinants of recreational visits. Although further refinements are needed, the future for spatial benefit transfer models appears promising.

The majority of studies on European integration focus on the implementation of EU policies and regulations at the national or regional levels or on the influence of national and regional institutions in ED policy-making (Anderson, 1990; Tranholm-Mikkelsen, 1991; Geyer, 1996; Moravcsik, 1993; Marks, 1996; Majone, 1997). A smaller number of studies report on a series of changes appearing at local government level and connect them with a changing environment at the ED level and with the increasing importance of the EU funding programmes (Martin and Pearce, 1993: Goldsmith, 1993; John, 1996: Sutcliffe. 1997). However, the use of a top-down perspective has limited the findings of the previous research. The main objective of this thesis is to expand the knowledge on the phenomenon of ED funding within local governments, adopting a bottom-up approach, where changes appeared at the local government level, which were not included in EU directives, regulations and policy proposals, but represented a consequence of a changing order at the European arena. The research question asked in the study is: "Why do some local governments succeed and others fail in applying for EU funds?" Little empirical research has been conducted in order to understand the ED funding procedures followed by local government organisations, and how those procedures affected the organisations themselves and their employees. The study's objective is to build a theory exploring the process of competing for new types of funding within local government organisations. A theoretical framework is proposed at the beginning of the study which connects the phenomenon of EU funding with the presence of three important constructs: Europeanisation, networking and entrepreneurship. These constructs were explicitly measured in the interview protocol. From the analysis of the data, the constructs emerged as related to the success in ED funding within local governments through a causal relationship.

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This thesis examines the recent experience of industrial policy in Mozambique in the context of developments in the economy as a whole and in the Southern African region, in order to draw attention to the fundamental pressures and issues that form part of the economic policy decision-making process. The thesis analyses the debate between opponents and proponents of industrial policy, and concludes that there is no abstract rationale for or against industrial policy that is independent of the specific socio-economic pressures and processes of change under consideration. Orthodox and heterodox arguments for and against industrial policy tend to analyse either agents or linkages in a simplistic way and to ignore the dynamic relationships between them. Thus, they fail to acknowledge that decisions regarding investment and industrial strategies reflect a three-way interaction between the state, capital and labour under specific socio-economic conditions and pressures; that the state and the relationships between the economic agents through or outside the state are influenced by similar conditions, processes and forces; and that the state operates through the market. Hence, the state and the market are not alternatives to each other. Outside the analysis of specific socio-economic conditions there is no way of determining how strategies, policies and interactions between agents and linkages will materialise in economic performance. The main original contribution of the thesis consists of the expansion and application of the linkages-agencies analytical framework to the study of the recent experience of industrial development in Mozambique. This is done within the context of dynamic pressures, conflict, policy reform and development that occur in the economy as a whole, and pressures and influences associated with the Southern African region, in particular with the re-structuring of South African capitalism. Consistent long-term time series and cross section data sets were constructed, out of fragmented and inconsistent data sets, to analyse the performance and role of the manufacturing sector within the Mozambican economy over the last four decades, and to study the patterns of investment in the Mozambican economy in the 1990s.

This thesis investigates the processes and influences that have driven regional economic development in Romania during the period 1945-95. One of the central aims is to examine whether the change from a planned to a market economy has significantly influenced the spatial distribution of economic activity. The initial part of the thesis exammes the theoretical perspectives of Romanian regional development challenging the neo-classical hypothesis and proposing that Romanian development patterns, under both the socialist andThe thesis presents an investigation of the patterns of national and regional development during 1945-95. One of the central messages that emerges is the importance of national and regional industrial structures to overall economic performance. It is argued that while the transition of the socialist economy to the market model may involve a fundamental change in the national and regional economic framework, both systems prioritised national growth over regional concerns through the focus on economic efficiency at the expense of equity considerations. The empirical results presented in the thesis reveal that economic growth free market, are best placed within the context of cumulative growth and agglomeration economies. within Romania is concentrated on previously developed regional centres. Both the socialist and free market systems failed to generate any fundamental change in the distribution of regional economic activity, although the introduction of the market economy is found to be marginally divergent. This is itself a rejection of the argument that the introduction of market forces will lead to a greater convergence in regional economic activity

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