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2006-11-15

SME Support in Post-communist Countries: Moving from Individual to Cooperative Approaches (Reflections on the Polish Case)

Author/Editor:	Richard Woodward
Source:	MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2001, pp. 275-94
Year of issue:	2001
Abstract:	In the most advanced post-Communist countries of Europe, including Poland, the dynamic growth of the small business sector has been the chief factor driving economic growth since 1992, and has been accompanied by a number of public programs supporting Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) development. However, I argue that something crucial is generally missing from these programs; namely, an attempt to go beyond the problems of individual businesses to approaches based on forms of association and cooperation which preserve, and even enhance, the overall competitiveness of the economy. As a result, while the Visegrad countries are doing well on numbers of SMEs, they are lagging behind in the development of those firms. While proponents of such cooperative arrangements in Poland usually meet the argument that Polish culture does not provide fruitful soil for them, one can point to a handful of experiments in the area of small business finance which prove that this is not necessarily so. This paper presents reflections on the problems and potential of public SME support programs based on case studies of two mutual loan guarantee funds, an enterprise incubator, and various types of business supports centers in one region.


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