Business reactions to the 2001 foot and mouth disease outbreak in Scotland

Abstract

The paper focuses on two aspects of the 2001 foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak in Scotland that have been largely ignored: first, business managers perceptions of the impact of FMD during and immediately after the outbreak; and second, reactions to the outbreak in terms of action taken by businesses and advice sought. A panel survey of non-farm businesses conducted in April, June and September of 2001 is analysed to shed light on these issues. We find that even at the time, the vast majority of businesses did not report any real impact, although businesses in rural areas and in the tourism industry were more likely to feel some impact – either positive or negative. We show that business managers appeared to favour private sources of advice, although some public sources were found to be very useful, and that some actions, such as increased advertising in tourism businesses, could be more effective than others, such as making redundancies. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for contingency planning in the event of future FMD outbreaks.

Acknowledgement

Wendy Kenyon is supported by a Scottish Executive Environmental and Rural Affairs Department (SEERAD) senior research fellowship. Alana Gilbert has worked on this project under RO 203909 funded by the SEERAD. The authors would like to thank SEERAD for granting them permission to use the survey data, and Deb Roberts, Rob Burton, Clive Spash and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on previous versions of the paper.

Notes

¹ Set up by Ross Finnie, Minister for Environment and Rural Development. It included representatives from within the Scottish Executive, the Enterprise networks, employment services, Visitscotland, local authorities, the Scottish Agricultural College.

² The response to this question has been treated in the analysis as a perception since the reply was based on the overall feeling of the respondent to the outbreak on the business rather than on robust figures related to income, turnover etc. This approach can be rationalised in the light of research showing that the impact of the FMD outbreak proved not to be as serious as many people had felt it to be at the time.

³ We originally estimated a multinomial logit, which showed that each of our variables had the same direction of effect on the probability of experiencing a negative impact, a positive impact and a mixed impact of FMD. For example, being in tourism increased the probability of experiencing each of these three impacts, while it reduced the probability of experiencing no impact. The real difference therefore was felt to be between ‘no impact’ and ‘any impact’, and this is what is modelled in Table 5