Though SMEs have low accessibility to institutional credit, this accessibility may reduce the cost of capital. Therefore, this study explores field level status of accessibility of SMEs to institutional credit along with finding out the causes of low accessibility. Descriptive statistics, accounting and financial techniques, and a logistic regression model are applied to analyse the data. This study finds a demand and supply gap of SME credit. Moreover, SMEs have to bear some additional costs besides the interest of institutional credit. Banks are more conscious regarding their loan’s safety and security in the SME sector. Therefore, SMEs are facing difficulties in getting access to institutional credit. Again, SME entrepreneurs are not concerned regarding the interest rate of institutional credit, which ensures that the entrepreneurs are capable enough to earn more than the cost of institutional credit. By the study’s findings, respective government authorities, Bangladesh Bank, banks, other financial institutions and SME entrepreneurs can get a guideline to enhance the credit flow in the SME sector.

This study provides a way of understanding to analyze the performance of SME credit both from the demand and supply sides. Both primary and secondary data are used which are collected from entrepreneurs of SMEs and the head office of Rajshahi Krishi Unnayan Bank, a leading SME loan providing government-owned agricultural development bank in the Rajshahi district of Bangladesh. Some descriptive statistics, accounting and financial techniques, and a regression model are used to analyze the data. The study finds that the average ROA of SMEs is 35.87% and the ROE of SMEs is 62.81%. It indicates that the SMEs are earning more than the cost of the fund collected from the institutional sources. It is also observed that there is a significant effect of institutional credit on ROE of SMEs but not on ROA. On the other hand, the growth rate of SME NPL is higher than the total NPL during the study years that is of course alarming regarding SME loan recovery. The institutional SME credit should be increased by applying proper strategies for increasing loan recovery performance.

This study has attempted to calculate the actual cost of the fund of SMEs by considering the fund from institutional and non-institutional sources. For this study, some financial tools, techniques, two samples mean comparison test and ANOVA test have been used to analyze the cross-sectional primary data. The study has found that the average actual cost of the fund from institutional sources, non-institutional sources (without trade credit) and trade credit are 15.52%, 32.11% and 40%, respectively. The cost of the external financing of small enterprises is higher than the medium enterprises and this cost in manufacturing sectors is higher than the service/trade sectors. Again, this cost in rural region is higher than the urban region but it is not statistically significant. The average cost of external financing of SMEs is about 29% which is really high to conduct a business properly.

This study attempts to investigate whether the financing preferences of small and medium enterprises (SMEs)’ entrepreneurs of Bangladesh follow capital structure theory by investigating into Pecking Order Theory (POT). For this study, cross-sectional primary data have been collected through questionnaire. The answers of the questions have been measured through five points Likert Scale. The scores were analyzed using mean score. To analyze the data, some descriptive statistics have been used. Besides, one sample one tail [Formula: see text]-test has been applied to test the hypotheses. The study finds that the entrepreneurs themselves do not believe that there is an information asymmetry in debt market. But their perception regarding debt market ascertained the presence of the information asymmetry between SME sector (entrepreneurs of SME) and the debt market (banks). The answers of respondents are statistically significant that they want to use the retained profits first, bank loan as second and want to issue external equity (taking partner/s) as a third option among these three alternatives of additional financing. This tendency of the respondents towards financing is consistent with POT. Therefore, Government policy for motivating SMEs to keep formal accounting should be introduced to reduce the information asymmetry in debt market along with taking proper initiatives to increase accessibility of SMEs to institutional credit.