Ascertaining students’ entrepreneurial intention and looking into their perception of the obstacles surrounding the entrepreneurial process are the objectives of this research. To achieve these objectives, a cross-sectional, quantitative, observational and analytical study was developed. To carry out this study, a random sample constituted by 269 students from Braganza School of Agriculture was collected. Descriptive statistics and statistical tests, namely, Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test, Kolmogorov-Smirnov with Lilliefors correction test and Levene test were computed using SPSS 16.0. A likely bankruptcy was identified as a critical factor in starting up a business. Lack of financial support was pointed as the major difficulty concerning business development. However, according to the results, 35.2 % of the respondents would like to create their own business and contribute to the development of the regional economy, specifically, in the agriculture, food, biotechnological and environmental sectors.

The purpose of this article is to piece together a picture of Portuguese regions at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, the authors tried to group NUT III regions according to the location of productive activities bearing in mind employment and other economic and social indicators, namely productivity and purchasing power, as well as competitiveness and environmental quality indicators. Using clusters, it was possible to obtain a map of Portugal containing 6 cluster typologies. Clearly, at one end of these typologies are the regions where tertiary activities are predominant and where there is more purchasing power, productivity and competitiveness, causing, however, more damages to the environment, whereas at the other end are the rural less competitive regions with a lower purchasing power but environmentally more attractive. In between, there are other situations which are also looked into.