Small- and Medium-Size Enterprise Financing in Eastern Europe
By L. Klapper, Virginia Sarria-Allende, Victor Sulla. 2002
170 citations recorded by the source corpus.
There is currently a large interest in understanding firms' access to finance, particularly in the financing of small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). But the financing patterns of SMEs across countries is not well understood. For example, little is known about the relative importance of equity, debt, and inter-firm financing for SMEs across countries. The authors use the Amadeus database, which includes financial information on over 97,000 private and publicly traded firms in 15 Eastern and Central European countries. The Amadeus database allows the authors the opportunity to provide a new analysis of the general financing patterns of private firms across a large sample of Eastern European countries. The summary statistics show that the size of the SME sector (as measured by the percentage of total employment) in Eastern European countries is smaller than in most developed economies. Although the authors find in almost every country in the sample a large number of SMEs as a percentage of total firms, the SMEs in Eastern Europe are generally small and hire few employees. However, SMEs seem to constitute the most dynamic sector of the Eastern European economies, relative to large firms. In general, the SME sector comprises relatively younger, more highly leveraged, and more profitable and faster growing firms. This suggests that a new type of firm is emerging in transition economies that is more market- and profit-oriented. But at the same time, these firms appear to have financial constraints that impede their access to long-term financing and ability to grow.
Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/141d475983383d8d622f86f76c3e42aca47800b5
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Citations in the corpus
- The Role of Firm-Specific Incentives and Country Factors in Explaining Voluntary IAS Adoptions: Evidence from Private Firms (2008, background): “We focus on private firms for three reasons.3, 4 First, while private firms are generally small in size, in the aggregate they are important to global economic growth in terms of their contribution to employment and output (Schmitz, 1989; Klapper et al., 2002).”
- Financing patterns of European SMEs – an empirical taxonomy (2016, unknown): “In contrast to prior findings, the cluster analysis indicates that SMEs in these transition economies less often seem to be flexible-debt-financed and trade-financed SMEs (Delcoure 2007; Klapper et al. 2002).”
- Does bankruptcy law improve the fate of distressed firms? The role of credit channels (2020, background): “Younger firms grow and innovate over time and are likely to be more leveraged (Klapper et al., 2002).”
- The Dynamic Adjustment Towards Target Capital Structures of Firms in Transition Economies (2006, background): “The database is intended to cover only privately owned, not state-owned firms (Klapper et al., 2002).”
- Comparing the Impact of Credit Constraints on the Growth of SMEs in a Transition Country with an Established Market Economy (2006, background): “While a study by Klapper et al. (2002) investigates financing of SME across 15 CEE countries.”