> Capital. The scope is finance: Upstream (from suppliers) or downstream (from
customers)
> Information and Knowledge. The scope is capacity building: Upstream(from
suppliers) or downstream (from customers)
> Employment. The scope is productivity and capacity building: According to sources
of employment and the qualitative characteristics of employment.
2.2 Spatial Characterization/ Location
Another important feature of peripheral and rural business networks concerns with their
spatial expansion. The terminology of vertical and horizontal networks is used in
business economics to indicate networks linking businesses at different stages of the
production chain (vertical linkages) and at the same stage of production (horizontal
linkages). The first attempt to define the same terms under a spatial perspective first
appears in Murdoch (2000) with the term ‘vertical networks’ referring to those networks
linking rural spaces into the agro-food sector and the term ‘horizontal networks’
referring to those networks that link rural spaces into more general and non-agricultural
processes of economic change. This is a clear spatial-sectoral view of network operation
with an obvious focus on the agro-food sector. Building on Murdoch’s (2000)
suggestion that the concept of network can provide a new paradigm of rural
development, Kneafsey et al (2001), have, in a sense, redefined the concept provided by
Murdoch and adapted it to a culture economy framework giving it a more spatial focus.
The specific hypothesis will be to test whether businesses having strong access to
vertical and horizontal networks are performing better and thus combat peripherality.
We should also attempt to disentangle the major flows and external to the business
factors influencing formation and access to networks. In the framework of our empirical
work to come in this project many other hypothesis concerning the relation between
business performance and the operation of business networks will be formulated and
tested.
A classification according to the spatial location of the involved parties (nodes) may be
characterized as having:
> Vertical networks : The thread is with businesses (business) outside the location
where the business under consideration is established. Kneafsey et al. (2001), argue that
strong vertical networks allow local enterprises to be characterized by external market