مداخله دولتی بازارهای اعتباری شرکت کوچک در UK : ارزش پول و یا اتلاف منابع کمیاب؟

Loan guarantee schemes are used in many countries to provide financial support to small firms by guaranteeing loans from commercial banks, but questions remain about whether public intervention in private credit markets to support entrepreneurial firms is justified. This paper examines whether the UK Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme (SFLG) provides value-for-money to the UK tax payer, presenting a regression based performance approach which then feeds into a formal cost–benefit analysis. Specifically, we consider whether firm performance post-investment is such that it justifies the governments’ presence in the lending market and the costs associated with it. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial firms that are able to access new finance through SFLG achieve superior performance in the form of improved sales, job creation and exports and that this justifies public intervention in private credit markets.

Bruce Kirchhoff was one of the first scholars in the post-Birch Job Generation Study period to not only update the job generation findings of Birch (1979), but add to our understanding of the relative dynamics of job creation across different size classes of firm. As a result of his early work (Kirchhoff and Phillips, 1988), and the consistent evidence that small, and specifically new, firms create a disproportionately high number of net new jobs, he became more widely interested in questions around how policy-makers could support smaller and younger entrepreneurial firms to maximise their potential to the wider benefit of the economy. Of particular concern to Kirchhoff was (a) that policy had up until that point ignored smaller firms, and explicitly the creation of new firms (Kirchhoff, 1996, p. 628), (b) that rigidities in the labour market had created barriers that prevented entrepreneurial firms from hiring more workers (Kirchhoff and Phillips, 1988, pp. 271–272), and (c) that the removal of barriers to new firm entry was critical to future economic dynamism and growth (Kirchhoff, 1994, p. 199).

Two of Bruce Kirchhoff's major contributions were to (a) justify and quantify the important contribution of smaller and younger firms to job creation and general economic development, and (b) argue that government had a key role in maximising the potential of entrepreneurial activity. In the light of this, most developed and developing countries have some form of loan guarantee scheme to support private sector commercial lending to smaller entrepreneurial businesses. The underlying rationale for providing such schemes is to promote and support economic development through maximising the potential of the entrepreneurial sector of the economy. In itself this is surprising given that commercial credit markets are often perceived to be the most efficient form of capitalist market. Implicitly, bankers are often assumed to be efficient processors of business information and it follows that loans only flow to entrepreneurs with viable business propositions