The Impact of Business Support Services for Small and Medium Enterprises on Firm Performance in Low -and Middle- Income Countries: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license.Following a peer review process, and with previous written consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a revised version of this work may also be reproduced in any academic journal, including those indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Therefore, the restriction to receive income from such publication shall only extend to the publication's author(s). With regard to such restriction, in case of any inconsistency between the Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license and these statements, the latter shall prevail.Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license.The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inter-American Development Bank, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.http://www.iadb.org 2016 AbstractInterventions designed to support small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are popular among policy makers, given the role SMEs play in job creation around the world. Business support interventions in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) are often based on the assumption that market failures and institutional constraints impede the growth of SME growth. Significant resources from governments and international organizations are directed to SMEs to maximize their socioeconomic impact. Business-support interventions in LMICs most often relate to formalization and business environments, exports, value chains and clusters, training and technical assistance, and access to credit and innovation. Very little is known about the impact of such interventions despite the abundance of resources directed to SME business-support services. This paper systematically reviews and summarizes 40 rigorous evaluations of SME-support services in LMICs and presents evidence to help inform policy debates. The study found indicative evidence that overall business-support interventions help improve firm performances and create jobs. However, little is still known about which interventions work best for SMEs and why. More rigorous impact evaluations are needed to fill the large knowledge gap in the field.

Can Sustainable Investing Save the World? Reviewing the Mechanisms of Investor Impact

“…A direct way in which sustainable investors may enhance a company’s financing conditions is by providing capital on concessionary terms. Subsidizing companies that are deemed beneficial for development by providing them with financing more attractive than that available at market conditions is widely practiced by development finance institutions and other public sector actors and has been shown to enhance corporate investment (see, e.g., Cravo & Piza, 2016; Kersten et al, 2017; Yaron & Schreiner, 2001). Brest and Born (2013) and Brest et al (2018), as well as Chowdhry et al (2019), argue that private investors too can promote sustainable companies by providing them with capital on concessionary terms—that is, with better conditions than these companies would obtain from preference-neutral investors.…”

Entrepreneurship and competitiveness of subregions. The case of the Wielkopolska region in Poland

“…The role of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in the global economy has been widely described in related literature. Their changing condition and entrepreneurial factors along with current trends in this area, as well as public policy leading to entrepreneurship support are the subject of numerous empirical studies both internationally (Cravo and Piza, 2016;European Investment Bank, 2016;Ferreira, Mendes, and Pereira, 2016;OECD, 2017;World Bank Group, 2018; World Bank Ghana Office, 2013; Rateiwa and Azjakpono, 2015) as well as at the level of countries (Anton and Onofrei, 2016;Bank Pekao, 2017). The growing importance of SMEs in Poland is influenced by many factors, among others (Chaber et al, 2018):…”

“…In the face of the presented barriers and reasons for SMEs' failure, it is understandable that supporting the development of entrepreneurship and existing micro and medium-sized enterprises is the goal of numerous international institutions, public authorities and the institutional environment (Łuczka and Małecka, 2018). So far, however, not much is known about which of these instruments lead to the best results in this respect and why (Cravo and Piza, 2016).…”

A mixed methods assessment of technical and financial assistance to small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises in Kenya's food sector

“…Prior literature on the impact of general business training programs 1 has primarily addressed managerial constraints of micro‐entrepreneurs and has generated conflicting findings (Cho & Honorati, 2014; Cravo & Piza, 2016; McKenzie & Woodruff, 2014). Some of these interventions may have failed because their approach was too generic to address the specific needs of the entrepreneurs.…”