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This paper examines the impact of government taxation policy on self‐employment as the preferred form of job tenure in the British construction industry. It analyses the rapid growth in self‐employment over the period 1970‐1996 in the context of a very benign tax regime. It shows how self‐employment has grown far more rapidly in construction than in other economic sectors and also how British construction has more self‐employment than its European counterparts. The role of financial factors, especially taxation, in the decisions of companies to use self‐employed workers and in workers themselves opting for self‐employed status, is identified. Recent changes in the approach of taxation authorities towards construction workers are described and the broad impact of such measures on the propensity to self‐employment is outlined. An economic model is specified for explaining construction self‐employment in terms of taxation and other economic determinants and the empirical results of applying the model to annual data for the period 1970 to 1999 are reported.

Estimates of the UK demand for money function are obtained utilising the Box‐Cox family of power transformations based on a Bank of England adjusted data set for the period 1963I — 1979IV. The functions are subjected to functional and structural stability testing with careful consideration of the resulting error structure. First‐order autocorrelation problems are encountered in the narrow money series Ml and attempts to consider a more flexible dynamic structure are investigated.

Purpose – Reviewing the notion of ‘neo-productivism’ as represented in the literature, this chapter explores multiple forms of neo-productivsm and presents a case study of the dairy industry of New Zealand as a new form ‘cooperative productivism’.

Design/methodology/approach – First, a brief review of the literature on neo-productivist forms is performed in order to develop a framework of neo-productivism as presented in the literature. Second, a case study of Fonterra in New Zealand is undertaken and makes the case that Fonterra represents a new productivist form (that does not fit within the current literature) – that of cooperative productivism.

Findings – Three forms of neo-productivism are described in the literature, namely market productivism, competitive productivism and ‘neo-productivism’. We find that cooperative organisations (in this case Fonterra) can also develop into highly productivist forms when the objectives of members concur with the corporate objectives and are facilitated by a supportive government and weak environmental regulation. The possible implications for European rural development are discussed.

Originality/value – This chapter presents the first framework of the different neo-productivist forms and describes the new concept of cooperative productivism.