Guarantee Systems answer to different types of schemes and show particular designs although they have not been studied until now the effectiveness of them. Anyway, guarantee activity is beneficial for the entrepreneur and for financial institutions, finding common interests on them that, joined to the public sector, shape the guarantee activity as a policy that find the most effective coordination vectors between agents. The purpose of this paper is to explain if the characteristics of the guarantee systems are focused on credit institutions or the borrowers. Our results disclose that Latinoamerican systems use credit entities as allocators and the characteristics related with the satisfaction of banking needs are critical for a larger number of attended businesses.

One of the most important obstacles that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face when addressing their growth is access to finance. The asymmetry of information, the lack of guarantees and the difficulty in establishing effective legal rights explain these difficulties in access to finance. The solution of these obstacles has led to the implementation of policies seeking to address these challenges. The paper explains the relationship of these policies for the period 2004-2016 in 39 countries that belong to the group of developing and developed countries.Our results show that guarantee policies and the improvement of information quality are complementary. Moreover, the implementation of guarantee policies takes place in environments with weak judicial institutions. This result emphasizes the substitutable nature between guarantee systems and the legal reform of the credit rights' protections. The implications of our findings are relevant for policy makers to implement or strengthen the guarantee systems.