Access to Finance – Experiences of SMEs in Croatia

Abstract

Access to finance for small and medium enterprises still represents one of the biggest problems that entrepreneurs face when launching their business or when they want to enhance their production capacities in other stages of the enterprise life cycle. Entrepreneurs generally use informal sources of financing when starting their business (3F: family, friends and fools) if they do not have other available sources of financing. There is a common classification in the literature that divides the sources of financing to: informal investors, debt financing, equity financing, government support programs and the entrepreneurs’ own sources. The purpose of the survey conducted for this paper is to determine the sources of used finance of Croatian SMEs and the main problems that SMEs encountered while accessing finance. The second main goal of this article is to identify future needs for financing with potential financing problems that may occur. We gathered data from Croatian SMEs about the sources of funding used over the past three years and about the funding sources that they intend to use in the next three years. In last part of the paper we analyze the results from the survey and from that draw the implications for policy makers and market participants.