Environmental problems have been on top of government agendas with increasing threats from global warming and its associated implications for the economy and living standards. Technological improvements are seen as the best solution in countering the environmental impacts of economic activity. UK economy is no exception to this, where the environmental sector is put under the spotlight as gover...

Kaplan and Norton’s concept of the balanced scorecard (BSC) has received wide acceptance by both academics and practitioners. But there was little research on its adaptability to the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in china. According to our investigation on SMEs in Pearl River Delta from July to September of 2005, a BSC framework was created based on the special characteristics of Ch...

Business finance has been a major problem facing most businesses, both the small and large companies as well as the medium ones. Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) are no exceptions of the problems faced by businesses. These enterprises are mostly managed by low income earners. Some of these enterprises cannot grow into large companies because of lack of funds. The objectives of the stud...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the main determinants of growth in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in central and eastern Europe. The important role played by SMEs in the economic development of central and eastern European (CEE) countries has attracted the recent attention of academics and policymakers but remains relatively unexplored. Empirical research has suggested that f...

ZHENG XIAOSONG: A credit policy study of Chinese banks on small and medium-sized enterprises. Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae Brunensis, 2013, LXI, No. 7, pp. 2973–2982 In recent years, there is rising attention on the diffi cult fi nancing problems of small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs). With constant development and improvement in China’s socialist market eco...

This paper analyzes the importance of equity finance for the R&D activity of small and medium-sized enterprises. We use information on almost 6000 German SMEs from a company survey. Using the intensity of banking competition at the district level as instrument to control for endogeneity, we find that a higher equity ratio is conducive to more R&D for young but not for old companies. Equity may ...

This paper provides the first evidence on gender differences in investment financing, credit application and credit denial rates in Germany. The empirical analysis is carried out on a sample of firms drawn from the KfW Mittelstandspanel, a representative survey of German SMEs for the period from 2003 to 2009. Our results suggest that in female-owned firms the share of internal capital in invest...