Small Business and Public Policy

Public Policy interventions aimed at encouraging, supporting and developing small businesses are an important factor in understanding entrepreneurship and small business management. This text is the first to provide teachers and students with a resource that gives an overview of how institutional and policy structures interact with small firm start-ups, continuation and succession/failures.

Beginning with a brief introduction to policy processes, the text also covers the scope for different intervention at different scales: macroeconomic (international, national) and regional/local. The author then applies four lenses to provide different contexts to understand the theory and practice of public policy for small business management:

• The UK is used to cover long-term historical evolution of small businesses and how this has stimulated different policy approaches
• The USA provides greater emphasis on varied approaches within a federal system and the specifics of the SBA
• The EU is used as a case to engage with international and varied policy approaches
• Emerging economies are used to provide insights into radically different ways of combining understanding of small firm start-ups, continuation and succession/failures with policy approaches within the context of globalization

Written by a pre-eminent scholar of public policy and entrepreneurship, this textbook provides a concise but thorough introduction to the subject for Masters students internationally.