Search results for "Access to finance"
showing 8 items of 18 documents
Micro and Small Businesses Access to Finance and Financial Literacy of their Owners: Evidence from Latvia, Estonia and Georgia
2021
Lack of financial literacy of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) owners/managers is often mentioned among the reasons of their financial exclusion. The main objective of the article is to verify whether the targeted group - MSMEs - access to finance and financial literacy of their owners/managers are closely linked in observed countries – Latvia, Estonia and Georgia. As a supportive objective, analysis of the relationship between financial literacy of MSMEs owners, adult literacy and the level of general education in a country is also analyzed. The research is exploratory in its nature, based on intensive literature review, analysis of the countries’ statistics and the case s…
The Political Economy of the World Bank. The Early Years
2009
This book covers the early years of the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), commonly known as the World Bank when it first confronted the issue of development as a fundamental part of its mission. The book is mainly concerned with how the Bank interpreted its mission and, more specifically, how its mission was born: what events shaped it, what cultural and ideological background influenced it and what was the historical context in which it arose. So this book is a contribution to the study of the prehistory of development, understood in its social and economic context. In this respect, the study of the early years of the World Bank offers excellent context for obser…
An entrepreneur's social capital and performance: the role of access to information in the Argentinean case
2012
Purpose - The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of an entrepreneur's social capital on their access to information, and how such access improves the performance of their entrepreneurial project. Design/methodology/approach - A structural equations model (SEM) is estimated and validated from a database including information from 282 Argentinean entrepreneurs who answered a questionnaire specifically designed for this research. The analysis of this model allowed the impact of dependent latent variables on the performance of the start-up to be determined. Findings - The performance of an entrepreneurial project depends on an entrepreneur's access to finance, markets and information. S…
Understanding Economic Growth in Ghana in Comparative Perspective
2019
Ghana has experienced a decade of solid and exceptionally high growth. Between 2005 and 2015, income nearly doubled. This paper analyzes the factors driving this impressive growth performance, using tools such as structural change decompositions and growth regressions. For the comparative perspective, the paper compares Ghana with its structural and aspirational peers. The paper finds that the contribution of structural change to growth has been limited and attributes this to labor that was freed up in agriculture not being absorbed by high-productivity sectors. Looking at factors that drove growth since 2000, financial development and infrastructure had the most important impacts. A benchm…
Regional determinants of access to entrepreneurial finance: a conceptualisation and empirical study in Norwegian startup ecosystems
2022
This paper presents hypotheses and a novel examination of the influence of a set of conditional factors concerning regional industries, startup culture, ecosystem collaboration and non-financial investor resources on perceived access to startup finance. We conducted a survey of 131 nascent, early-phase or mature startups and founders associated with entrepreneurial ecosystems in rural and urban Norway. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Two main findings are that (1) startups that open up for outside involvement at an earlier phase experience better perceived access to finance and (2) unrelated ventures in homogenous industrial regions find it harder to attract finan…
Perceived problems with collateral: The value of informal networking
2020
Abstract Many businesses in emerging economies are financially constrained due to their limited use of formal loans. Recent evidence suggests that negative perceptions discourage entrepreneurs from applying for loans. One of the main issues entrepreneurs mention is unattainable collateral requirements. In this paper, we contribute to this line of research by investigating the effect of networking with fellow entrepreneurs on perceived collateral problems. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data originating from female entrepreneurs in Tanzania, we find that through networking, entrepreneurs are exposed to stories of their peers’ experiences with loans which influence their perceptions …
Financing in SMEs: Case of the Baltic States
2014
Abstract Access to finance represents one of the most significant challenges for SMEs’ entrepreneurs. To ensure SMEs creation, existence and growth it is vitally important to understand the financing needs of SMEs and entrepreneurs, the main obstacles to finance availability and accessibility. The study indicates the difficulties in SMEs financing for the three Baltic States and provides the governments and other stakeholders with a tool to understand SMEs’ financing needs. The study results highlight importance of alternative resources of external financing for small developing countries such as the Baltic ones and the need to support the design and evaluation of policy measures and to mon…
An institutional view on access to finance by Tanzanian women-owned enterprises
2017
We investigate the limited use of bank and microfinance loans by Tanzanian female entrepreneurs. Using survey data, we observe that female entrepreneurs mainly use informal sources to finance their businesses. We analyze how “perceptions” of gendered cognitive and normative institutions determine whether a female entrepreneur applies for a formal loan. Following results stand out: first, we find that high collateral requirements, interest rates and personal guarantee requirements make formal loans unattractive. Second, female entrepreneurs only apply when they expect to be successful. Since they “perceive” access to finance to be more problematic for women,female entrepreneurs are discourag…