Cutting Red Tape – Legal and Institutional Tools to Promote SMEs (original) (raw)
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Zagreb International Review of Economics and Business
The importance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is widely recognised for the Slovenian economy. However, the issues regarding legislative and other administrative barriers and their perception by SMEs as a heterogeneous group of enterprises are not yet fully investigated. The main research hypothesis concerns that there exist significant differences in the perception of administrative barriers among characteristic SME groups. Consequently, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the key administrative barriers SMEs face in Slovenia. This entails three activities: (1) identifying the main areas in which barriers are found; (2) establishing what they imply performance-wise; and (3) providing policymaker guidelines tailored to different SME groups (size, legal form, sector, age). The empirical results, based on one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Bonferroni post hoc tests on a sample of 925 SMEs, show differences in the various groups of SMEs mentioned a...
EUROPEAN RESEARCH STUDIES JOURNAL
Purpose: Legislation and tax authority conduct upon play a very important role in determining overall business environment by defining the rules under which the enterprises have to operate. Nonetheless, the complexity of legislation creates also unnecessary administrative burdens and consequently hinders entrepreneurial activity. Accordingly, the main aim of this paper is to establish whether there is a link between the perception of administrative barriers in the field of tax compliance and financial reporting and different characteristics of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Design/Methodology/Approach: Conducting a field survey and applying a parametric statistical technique on a sample of 293 Slovenian SMEs. Findings: The empirical results show that there are statistically significant differences in characteristics between those SMEs that perceive administrative barriers above average and those that perceive administrative below average in the field of tax compliance and financial reporting. Practical Implications: The overall findings suggest that regulatory authorities bear in mind that complexity of tax-related administrative barriers have a price resulting in deterioration of the business environment for SMEs and their performance. Originality/value: Utilising a comprehensive dataset covering Slovenian SMEs made by merging multiple data sources, namely field survey, balance-sheet and income-statement data, representing the main originality and value of the paper.
2003
Impact of regulation on SMEs This special issue presents a collection of papers, that examine the impact of regulation on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and growing businesses. SMEs are recognised as agents of industrial change and innovation, and important vehicles for employment creation and economic growth. Thus, across OECD states, governments administer special support mechanisms, including tax and regulatory measures (such as exemptions), with the aim of improving the economic and technological environment of smaller businesses, and thereby facilitating their formation, survival, growth, and, for a small elite, their transformation into internationally competitive enterprises. A number of organisations have reported that excessive regulation is an emerging barrier to the survival and growth of small firms (British Chambers of Commerce, 2002; SBRT, 2001). Small businesses are more severely affected by red tape than are large companies because small firms are less proficient in dealing with the complexities of regulation and are unable to spread the costs of compliance across large-scale operations. Governments increasingly recognise this and try to alleviate the resulting competitive distortions through the promotion of initiatives such as those recommended by the Better Regulation Task Force in the United Kingdom and the Mandelkern Group in the European Union (BRTF, 2000; Mandelkern, 2001). However, a recent NatWest Small Business Research Trust survey estimated that red tape' costs the UK economy »17 billion a year. Last year the British Chambers of Commerce updated their Burdens Barometer and argued that the total cost of regulation introduced since 1997 had risen to »20 billion.
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Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are very important for the European economy. However, SMEs often encounter various barriers, whereby tax-related barriers are perceived as the most burdensome that affects their business operations and entrepreneurial activity in general. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it attempts to identify SMEs perception on current state and measures to be carried out in order to reduce respective red tape. Second, it tries to establish the relationship between burdens imposed by tax policy and entrepreneurial activity. Using hierarchical cluster analysis and descriptive statistics two different datasets are analyzed for the European Union (EU) and Slovenia separately. The results provide evidence that tax burden is less influential than tax administrative burden among EU countries by considering their impact on new business density and total early-stage entrepreneurial activity. Additionally, the results for Slovenia reveal that the need for a stabl...
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Access to finance plays a crucial role in the growth of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), thus affecting the development of the emerging countries. SMEs, which record their transactions under international accounting standards and use external auditors, finance their growth and working capital through formal external sources (Nizaeva & Coskun, 2018). In addition, the decision-making process of crediting depends particularly on the SMEs’ financial reporting, thus it requires complete transparency of their financial reports. Taking into consideration the important role that financial transparency plays in the access to finance as well as its impact on the SMEs’ growth, the main aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of the financial transparency on the financing obstacles of the SMEs operating in the Western Balkan countries, through the usage of the survey data collected from the 6th Business Environment and Enterprise Survey (BEEPS VI), enabled by European Bank for Research a...