engleski

Financial Resource Availability and Financing Needs of SMEs in EU28 and Croatia

This paper is closely linked to the survey of the European Commission and the European Central Bank and their initiatives to better understanding of the specific financial needs of SMEs. Using newly gathered data from the SAFE this paper outlines the main features of a broad range of financial resources and explains how SMEs' financial needs were affected by the changes in the general economic and financial environment. The results of this study reveal that financial resource availability and financing needs of SMEs in Croatia differ substantially from SMEs at the EU level but they also share the strong reliance on external sources of finance. The importance of access to finance and financing conditions for the production of SMEs is analysed by panel estimation models using one-step system GMM estimator with robust standard errors. The results of the analysis based on model including 19 EU countries indicate that lower borrowing costs have positive impact on the production value of SMEs. A more comprehensive model including all EU countries proved that better access to finance has a stimulating effect on the production of SMEs.

Access to finance, European Union, Financing, Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs)

nije evidentirano