1887

Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs 2024

An OECD Scoreboard

image of Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs 2024

Since 2020, a series of shocks to the global economy has had significant impacts on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs and their access to finance. Most recently, significant inflationary pressures have led to tighter lending conditions, limiting the flow of finance to SMEs and acting as a barrier to investment. Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs 2024: An OECD Scoreboard monitors SME and entrepreneurship financing trends, conditions and policy developments in close to 50 countries. It documents a strong increase in the cost of SME financing in 2022, alongside a significant decline in SME lending. Equity finance also fell sharply in 2022, after a year of historically high growth in 2021. Women-led and minority-owned businesses, which typically find it more difficult to access venture capital financing, were affected disproportionately. Against this backdrop, the Scoreboard highlights the recent measures governments have taken to support SME access to finance, including finance for the green transition. A continued focus on diversifying financial sources and instruments will be important to meet the different needs of all types of SMEs and entrepreneurs, and enable them to act as an engine of resilient, sustainable and inclusive growth.

English Also available in: French

Greece

During 2021 and 2022, economic activity rebounded significantly, covering most of the lost ground from the pandemic shock. Real GDP increased by 8.4% in 2021 after shrinking by around 9% in 2020. This strong growth trend continued in 2022 during which real GDP grew by 5.9%. This is mainly due to private consumption, a significant increase in investments and the recovery of tourism. The uptick in investments in 2022 is related to a significant increase in new business lending, which almost doubled in 2022 after a decade of relatively low volume and a decrease of 26.8% in 2021 vis-à-vis 2020. Still, new lending to SMEs grew proportionally less, by 35%, compared to an impressive 87% increase in new loans for all firms’ sizes. As a result, the share of SMEs in new loans dropped to 20.5%, down from 28.3% in 2021.

English

Graphs

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error