Securing a business loan : how important is gender

This report examines the role of gender in business and evalates whether there is a evidence of gender bias when it comes to securing bank loans

Control of black spot; peas, potatoes, lettuce

Please find attached summaries for all experiments completed as at February 1, 1985. Crop Trial number Title Status Peas - 84MT49 Control of black spot Completed. Potatoes - 84PE25 Varietal susceptibility - Powdery scab Completed 84MD46 Varietal susceptibility to soft rot Erwinia Completed 84PE31 Yield loss and disease damage of potatoes due to Erwinia species Aborted 84MD37, 84PE32, 84PE33: Incidence of soft rot Erwinia in potato/cauliflower rotations Completed 84MN31 Yield loss and disease damage of potatoes due to Erwinia species Continuing 84MN32 Varietal susceptibility to soft rot Erwinia Continuing 84MN33 Incidence of soft rot Erwinia in potato crops Continuing Lettuce 84MD35,37-51 Varietal susceptibility to dry leaf spot (d.L.s.) Completed 84MD36,52 Importance of seed-borne inoculum to disease development (d.L.s.) Completed 84MD72 Control of dry leaf spot of lettuce with copper sprays Completed 84MD73 Effect of crop rotation on dry leaf spot Continuing 84MD70 Varietal susceptibility to dry leaf spot Continuing 84MD71 Importance of seed-borne inoculum to disease development (d.L.s.) Completed 84MD76 Yield loss of lettuce due to dry leaf spot Completed 84MD77 Persistance of Xanthamonas campestris pv. vitians in soil Aborte

Economic performance and sustainable growth : the role of women entrepreneurs in UK economic development

This research demonstrates that women entrepreneurs make important contributions to economic development, but are disadvantaged by initial under-capitalisation. Working with UK and devolved governments, leading banks and finance institutions, and regional enterprise support organisations, this research influenced policy debates; shaped women’s enterprise policy; improved understanding of factors underpinning access to finance for diverse enterprises; and influenced the work of business support organisations and commercial banks

Can we promote plural local pathways to sustainable development? Insights from the implementation of Wales’s Future Generations Act

This paper examines the implementation of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, the first and only piece of legislation to codify the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals in law. The paper provides empirical analysis of the implementation of this legislation based on 16 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders across Wales. The analysis explores whether the Act can deliver spatial justice in Wales through its novel and place-based approach to sustainable development. We examine how the Act has been implemented at different spatial scales–the local, the regional and the national–and how the differences in the way it is interpreted by actors at these different levels influences the extent to which spatial justice is realised in its implementation

A tale of two ladies : Pink Lady and Sundowner

It is five years since the first Western Australianbred Pink Lady and Sundowner apples were sold on the local market. In that time, these crisp, sweet flavoursome apples have become top-selling, premium fruit. The story is no different overseas. Trial shipments to London, Taiwan and Singapore have indicated a big demand for the unique Pink Lady apple - far more than Western Australia can presently supply. One million fruiting Pink Lady apple trees are needed to meet anticipated export sales. Today, there are only 100,000 trees in the ground, of which about half are bearing fruit. New high quality apple varieties are Australia\u27s only hope of re-entering export markets on a large and sustained scale at profitable price

Making Markets in Employment Support: Promises and Pitfalls in the Work Programme’s Private Power Market

Welfare-to-work services have been a key area of experimentation in quasi-marketised public service delivery. The British flagship Work Programme is seen as an international pioneer in its reliance on outsourcing, payment by results and provider flexibility allied to promises of innovation and performance improvement. Within schemes dominated by such marketised accountabilities there are well-known risks and tensions around creaming, parking and churning. International literature equally makes clear that the design specificities of programme governance and accountabilities can play a key role in either facilitating or buttressing against these negative provider practices. In this context, the overarching question which animates this thesis is whether this crafted Work Programme design structure is sufficient and appropriate to steer its quasi-marketised providers to the achievement of the full suite of government policy objectives. Unprecedented academic access to the commissioning Department’s administrative datasets alongside sophisticated and conceptually tailored multivariate quantitative analyses underpin the thesis’ empirical contributions. The analysis is framed by an original multi-dimensional analytical framework articulating multiple potential alternative types of quasi-markets. This conceptually broad and empirically focused study provides a rare opportunity to trace outcomes directly from the plans and promises of a particularly bold quasi-market experiment and to consider the ways in which key design elements cascade through to, and are detectable in, the patterning of employment and earning outcomes of programme participants on the ground. The empirical analyses highlight myriad ways in which Work Programme promises end up in performance pitfalls despite, if not because of, its particular variety of quasi- marketised governance

Large amplitude radially symmetric spots and gaps in a dryland ecosystem model

We construct far-from-onset radially symmetric spot and gap solutions in a two-component dryland ecosystem model of vegetation pattern formation on flat terrain, using spatial dynamics and geometric singular perturbation theory. We draw connections between the geometry of the spot and gap solutions with that of traveling and stationary front solutions in the same model. In particular, we demonstrate the instability of spots of large radius by deriving an asymptotic relationship between a critical eigenvalue associated with the spot and a coefficient which encodes the sideband instability of a nearby stationary front. Furthermore, we demonstrate that spots are unstable to a range of perturbations of intermediate wavelength in the angular direction, provided the spot radius is not too small. Our results are accompanied by numerical simulations and spectral computations