Building Financial Support for SMEs in Central and Eastern Europe (Paperback)

This paper is based on a research programme funded under the EU Phase ACE programme which has examined the difficulty for small- and medium-sized firms in financing the volatile part of their balance sheet that runs from short-life capital assets through stocks to debtors and liquid reserves. By and large, the smaller the firm the more critical is the issue of short-term financing. Further up the firm size scale, more and more provision is subject to choice of self-provision. For that reason, the research has concentrated on the SME sector, although larger firms, as clients of a rather different palette of financial provision, have had to be considered.