WHEN Schumacher wrote his book, Small Is Beautiful, which, as the subtitle stated, was a study of economics "as though people mattered", he might well have been thinking of the rural economy.

York is a relatively small, and very agreeable place. Compared to the large cities of this country, London, Birmingham, Manchester it might be called small, but beautifully marked.

This size means that it is short of some facilities. Everyone can think of something which is lacking. My own least favourite is the absence of a decent bus station. If York had a bus station then it could be used as a hub for the surrounding area's bus services. It would make more effective the whole public transport system in the area, bringing huge environmental benefits.

Just as York is small compared to some cities in the UK it is huge compared to the towns and villages which surround it. The development of the economy in this part of the world has not lent itself to the gathering together of large numbers of people. The industrial revolution, powered as it was by the ability of water to drive machinery, found little use for the Ouse, meandering through the largely flat Vale of York.

Not until the coming of the railways, encouraged by that very flatness, and the development of chocolate manufacturing, did York have any major employers not associated with the surrounding agricultural enterprises.

This lingers on. Businesses are small, and frequently run by the founders or the families of the founders of those businesses. The Government now recognises the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises. As usual with governments, this recognition is late and accompanied by a blizzard of bureaucracy and paperwork which might have been designed to make the lives of such enterprises difficult, if not impossible.

VAT and National Insurance are gathered in, so that the Chancellor can occasionally give a little of our own money back to us. It is normally badly administered and misses most of its targets. We are, nevertheless, supposed to feel grateful.

A huge amount of employment is provided by these small enterprises. Because they are small it is possible actually to meet and to have a proper working relationship with the person making the decisions which affect the lives of the employed.

The best large firms are divided into chunks in which each member of staff feels that he or she is of value and that they can influence what is happening. Far too many reduce staff to feeling that they are just a tiny cog in a huge wheel and that their input is regarded as being of little value.

If the staff feel that their input is not regarded as being of value, they soon come to feel that they themselves are of little value. From there it is a short step to total disillusion and disengagement from the activities of the employer, and a general feeling of powerlessness both at work and in the social network in which we all operate outside work.

The countryside is full of small businesses providing employment for people in the local area in which they live. Because they are working close to home, the support structure upon which we all rely, although we often do not realise or admit it, is readily in place. In these days of technology it is possible for small employers to provide support systems for staff which are just as good as those which only large employers could provide in the past.

The best of both worlds. Small is, indeed, beautiful.