EU: Access to finance major problem for SMEs

30 September 2009 in Banking, Economy, Entrepreneurship, European Union, Microfinance

The European Commission published the results of the new ”Flash Eurobarometer: SMEs’ access to finance”. The survey, conducted with 9071 firms in 27 EU Member States, Croatia, Iceland and Norway, was set up to assess EU companies’ use of various sources of finance, to get a picture of the magnitude of companies’ difficulties in getting access to finance, and to obtain an overview of companies’ expectations for financing their future projects and developments. Overall, the survey revealed that businesses face difficulties in accessing finance, as almost half of them have problems to access bank loans. Despite the fact that availability of bank loans has deteriorated over the last six months for 46% of SMEs, over 70% of small businesses were able to receive all or part of the bank load they wanted, and only 15% were fully rejected. http://tinyurl.com/yantrpd