Andrew Errington

The peri-urban fringe: Europe's forgotten rural areas☆

The EC White Paper — The Future of Rural Society — identifies three “standard problems” of rural areas, but the first, which characterises areas associated with “the pressures of modern development”, receives little attention in the remainder of the document. This paper explains why it is particularly important that the peri-urban areas are not ignored in the development of rural policy. In the first place, the problems of these areas are inextricably linked to those of areas of rural decline and if such links are ignored the resulting partial analysis of rural problems may cause some important policy-options to be overlooked. Second, there continue to be pockets of disadvantage within the peri-urban areas where deprivation is likely to be increased by close proximity to an affluent majority. Finally, the paper analyses the Rural Community Strategy for Berkshire, a nonstatutory document prepared by a group drawn from governmental, quasi-governmental and non-governmental organisations in one peri-urban area of southern England. This shows that while the broad agenda of rural policy issues (covering employment, housing and services), may be very similar to that found in areas of rural decline the rationale for intervention is somewhat different, and transport issues may lie at the heart of the “standard problem” of these areas.

The delegation of decisions on the farm

Abstract This paper describes an extension of the methodology previously used to classify the agricultural workforce on the basis of activity analysis, rather than job title. Attention is focused on the decision-taking activity and, using a framework adapted from organisation studies in other sectors of the economy, it is shown how measures of the delegation of decision-taking within the farm business may be derived. The approach is used to explore the distinctive nature of decisions taken on farms and to examine the characteristics of farmers and farm businesses that are associated with a greater delegation of decision-taking. The study finds that the farmers age, the proportion of his working time that he spends in the business and the number of separate farms making up that business account for much of the observed variation.

Disguised unemployment in British agriculture

Abstract This paper highlights some important changes that are taking place in the composition of the agricultural and horticultural workforce in England and Wales. It suggests that the regular whole-time hired worker has been increasingly replaced on the one hand by the casual or contract worker and on the other by the family worker. There is also some evidence, at present anecdotal or at best circumstantial, that the children of farmers may be using the farm as an employment ‘refuge’ in a period in which employment opportunities in the economy as a whole are severely limited. This raises the question of whether the phenomenon of ‘disguised unemployment’ hitherto regarded as a feature of many less developed countries may be found among family-worked farms in England and Wales. It is important that future empirical investigations should attempt to establish whether this is indeed the case.

Investigating rural employment in England

Abstract This article describes a new approach to the examination of rural employment. Using Craigs classification of Local Authority wards, the Special Workplace Statistics of the 1981 Population Census are analysed to provide a picture of rural and urban employment in five English counties. The findings emphasise the heterogeneity of rural England but show consistently higher levels of self-employment in rural areas. It is concluded that Craigs classification, together with datafiles linking postcodes to ward identifiers, provides a very useful research tool to those investigating rural areas.

Alternative strategies for the collection of farm management data in Nigeria

Accurate, up-to-date information on current production costs and returns is a vital prerequisite for the further development of medium/large-scale commercial agriculture in Nigeria as in many other developing countries. However, present farm management data collection tends to be both inefficient and inadequate because it is carried out on an ad hoc basis. This paper argues for a more systematic approach to the design of farm management data collection procedures in Nigeria. The approach involves careful experimentation and the comparison of alternative methods on the basis of cost, accuracy and timeliness. A pilot study in Bendel State using this approach is described and findings presented on alternative data collection strategies. It is concluded that a combination of traditional self-completion methods and ‘consensus surveys’ constitutes the most cost-effective strategy.