Portfolio entrepreneurship in farming: Empirical evidence from the 1881 census for England and Wales

Determinants of Household Income and Employment Choices in the Rural Agripreneurship Economy

“…The motives of farmers and external factors in the African rural context are different from those of developed nations that are commonly found in the literature (see, e.g. Morris et al, 2017;Radicic et al, 2017). This study focuses on Nigeria.…”

“…The discussion on pluriactivity and diversification started in Europe and the US in the 1990s (Arkleton, 1993;Brun and Fuller, 1992;Dax et al, 1995). Since then, both concepts have been used in many studies referring to farmers' decision to have multiple income-generating activities (Morris et al, 2017;Radicic et al, 2017). These studies reveal that adopting a diversification strategy significantly increases farm profitability, adapt-ability and farm business resilience to seasonality, risk and vulnerability.…”

The Population of Non-corporate Business Proprietors in England and Wales 1891–1911

“…In the rest of this article the responses of multiple ticks are dealt with in the same way as the GRo itself: by assigning individuals to their first or 'main' occupation listed. However, multiple business descriptors allow identification of an important class of portfolio businesses that are the subject of more detailed analysis (Radicic et al, 2017).…”

“…Portfolios have been recognised as an important means by which businesses diversify and grow. Preliminary analysis of farm business portfolios in 1881 demonstrates the potential of the e-census data to be used to identify different types of business strategies: as responses to necessity or locational opportunity (Radicic et al 2017). Fifthly, the estimates of proprietor numbers in 1891-1911 provide a means to start investigating the continuities over longer periods of time: by attempting to join up with later twentieth-century Censuses, and by linking to earlier Censuses which followed a different format.…”

The British business census of entrepreneurs and firm-size, 1851–1881: New data for economic and business historians

“…Just like the impact of the Minnesota Historical Census projects (Ruggles and Menard 1995), the availability of census digital microdata has made possible new insights in British demographic, economic and social history. Over the past five years, the I-CeM data containing census records of the full population of England, Wales, and Scotland have been used to develop new interpretations of childhood mortality (Jaadla and Reid 2017;Atkinson et al 2017), family structure (Sch€ urer et al 2018), fertility Reid et al 2019), business proprietors (Bennett, Smith, and Montebruno 2018;Bennett et al 2019;Van Lieshout et al 2019), business partnerships (Bennett 2016), agriculture (Montebruno et al 2019a), women's occupations (You 2019), portfolios in farming (Radicic, Bennett, and Newton 2017), migration (Sch€ urer and Day 2019;Smith, Bennett, and van Lieshout 2019), and urban structure (Smith, Bennett, and Radicic 2018), and have been visualized and further made available in the online atlas Populations Past ). These analyses have considerably improved on scholarship based on the only source that was previously available with national coverage: the published tabulations created by the census administrators (the General Register Office: GRO) at the time of the censuses.…”