ABSTRACT
The growth of small firms is an important issue for economic development. Study after study has shown that small firms have made a disproportionately large contribution to economic growth over recent decades. The motivation for this study is the impact which expanding small firms can make to the development of peripheral regions. In particular, a detailed study of one of Europe's most peripheral regions, Northern Ireland, had shown that small firms were contributing far less to growth than were similar firms in some more centrally located regions. To explain why this was the case required an understanding of the factors influencing the growth of small firms. To our surprise the international literature on this important subject was patchy, and frankly, inadequate. As a result, we designed our own study, the subject of this book, to shed light on the factors accounting for the large differences in growth between individual small firms. This, in turn, was intended to help us understand the lagging growth of small firms in Northern Ireland and, perhaps, also in other peripheral regions.
