This thesis aims to critically examine the development of Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) in the UK: organisations that lend to businesses unable to access finance from mainstream sources. The overall aim of the research is to capture the development of a proto-type sector into a recognisable and fully-fledged financial sector. The research found there was considerable interest in CDFIs in the late 1990s fuelled by research reports published by the New Economics Foundation. Ideas and influences were being transferred to the UK from North American CDFIs and from micro-finance lenders in the developing world. While a few CDFIs had existed in the UK since the 1970s, from the late 1990s a new generation of organisations were being established to help combat what New Labour had defined as financial exclusion. The thesis identifies this group of CDFIs the ‘British New Wave’, because they were developing their own products and services to meet local needs. After 1997, New Labour ideas about a potential Third Way and Communitarianism were increasingly influential. This thesis argues that the subsequent development of CDFIs can be strongly interpreted as offering a Third Way between the market and the state. Their links with local communities or sectors (such as social enterprise) also enhanced their importance at district, regional and national levels. The research also analyses a number of individual case studies such as the Aston Reinvestment Trust and Street UK, the CDFI sector and government policy to highlight the complexity of the challenges facing CFDIs particularly the range of issues relating to funding. The thesis argues that the government’s initial interest in the sector has waned over time and some of New Labour policies aimed at promoting localism have in practice restricted the growth of CDFIs. At the end of the first decade of the twenty first century, the UK CDFI sector is surviving and offering loans to businesses excluded from finance and offering social and economic benefits that should be recognised and supported through social investment. However, despite the optimistic note in some areas of the thesis, it will be argued many CDFIs remain financially unsustainable precisely because they offer small business loans and work with their borrowers.

This thesis seeks to explore the changes of the Libyan economy, which began in the mid-1980s. The core of this research is to examine the influence of these changes on the course of the state and the implementation of the economic reform programmes. The relevant theoretical literature is based upon the relationship between the international and internal factors leading up the economic reform. The globalisation and state power are reviewed. The theory of rentier state and also the discussion of the most relevant aspects of the privatisation process were considered. The contribution of the thesis is its sustained analysis of the Libyan economic policies and, more importantly, its response to the neglect of the international and domestic influences of the economic reform process particularly in oil states. In addition, the literature on Libya and its structural and economic reform suffers from a lack of theoretically-grounded analysis. The methodology of this study is based upon combination of both interviews and questionnaires seemed the ideal methods in examining the economic reform and the privatisation programmes. The documentary research was also an important element for this study. In order to identify the determinants of the changes of the Libyan economy and the implementation process, it employs a variety of Libyan official documents and economic data. In general the study reveals that the relationship and the interaction between the international and domestic factors is extremely vital to understand the economic reform and privatisation programmes in Libya. Despite the significance of the international arena, its impacts are mitigated through the domestic context. Moreover, the previous state policies, the role of the state institutions and the interaction between the state apparatus and the Libyan society are important in understanding the Libyan economy.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate corporate governance practices of firms, in particular financial institutions, and their impact on the performance of these institutions. As such it will contribute to the debate on the importance of corporate governance for banks. The investigation will cover examples from developed and transition economies. Corporate scandals in the 1990s and 2000s drew the attention of governments to the importance of corporate governance, and induced legislation to prevent similar situations in the future. This thesis highlights the differences between corporate governance of firms and that of banks and investigates the nature of the relationship between corporate governance practices and performance of banks in the USA (as an example of a developed economy) and Kosova and Montenegro (as examples of South East European (SEE) transition economies). The thesis will also investigate the state of corporate governance in the two SEE countries and its developments since these countries became independent. This thesis will address two methodological issues that have been ignored or not treated jointly by previous research: the endogenous nature of corporate governance; and the dynamic aspect of the relationship with performance. In the context of SEE countries this thesis represents the first attempt to analyse the development of a corporate governance framework for financial institutions in Kosova and Montenegro, involving the creation of an index for the quality of corporate governance and, to the extent that the data permits, the first analysis of the relationship between corporate governance quality and the performance of financial institutions. The thesis investigates these questions by firstly embarking on a critical review of the literature to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the previous work in this area and identify the gap in the literature and secondly engaging in empirical investigation of the relationship. The data used for the empirical part of the thesis consists of published data on corporate governance ranking of US banks and the information on financial operations of banks from the Bankscope database. There are no published datasets on the state of corporate governance in SEE banks. A bank survey was therefore organised by the author to explore the compliance of these banks with OECD Corporate Governance Principles. The data was supplemented with the financial information of individual banks obtained from their annual reports. Using both, cross section and dynamic panel model techniques, the empirical investigation shows that there is a positive relationship between the measure of good corporate governance and the market capitalisation of banks in the USA. A similar relationship also exists between one dimension of corporate governance (shareholders’ rights) and the performance of financial institutions in Kosova and Montenegro. Thus, this research contributes to the scarce empirical research on the relationship between corporate governance and performance of financial institutions in the developed economies, and to the not hitherto investigated relationship in SEE countries.

Innovation is crucial for firms’ growth and competitiveness. Yet, because knowledge is a public good, firms may underinvest in innovation activities to avoid freeriding and opportunistic behaviour. Besides market failures, another cause of underinvestment in innovation is associated with the concept of systems failures, advanced in the literature on systems of innovation. Potential adverse effects of market and systems failures provide scope for government intervention designed to foster investment in innovation and bring about innovation activities at the socially optimal level. This thesis investigates the effectiveness of innovation policy for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by exploring whether public support has an "additionality" effect on their innovation activities. First, we investigate the impact of public support on innovation output (output additionality) in traditional manufacturing industries. Second, we focus on the effect of innovation support programmes on innovative behaviour, particularly on networking and cooperation for innovation among Spanish SMEs (behavioural additionality). Finally, we assess both output and behavioural additionality among European SMEs.