That old chestnut Market Failure...

Does anyone believe or use it any more!? Here is a list of the "ususal suspects" of market failure as relating to business support (SMEs usually).

Big problems for me in trying to apply market failure:
- lots of theory, little evidence - rarely is there good robust evidence that MF is occurring
- poor monitoring and evaluation - so we can't decide that if there was a MF in the first place, whether we have cured it or not

Quite a bit of business support is actually fairly closely related to MF. But some of it isn't. Personally I think its going to be useful to look into it in more depth. I have a lot of surveys and statistical things and my disposal and it looks like its time to dust off the SPSS manual...