The factors affecting accessibility to credit capital of small and medium enterprises in Vietnam

Abstract

The difficulty in accessing loans is one of the major barriers to the development of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam. Low accessibility to capital forces SMEs to spend both official and unofficial costs in order to obtain loans, and/or to access the unofficial market at higher interest rates, thereby increasing cost of production of enterprises. Studies suggest that the determinants of bank loan processing through which small and medium enterprises can access official loans include: characteristics of enterprises; indicators, reflecting the performance of enterprises; characteristics of loans; characteristics of enterprises, enterprise owners; geographical position of enterprises; the creditworthiness of enterprises and the role of the network.Purpose of the study.The aim of this paper is the quantitative analysis of the factors, affecting accessibility to credit capital of small and medium enterprises in Vietnam.Materials and methods.This study was conducted on the basis of a survey in December 2017. The survey includes 301 enterprises in Hanoi city. Selected enterprises are also enterprises, surveyed in the annual enterprise survey by the General Statistics Office of Vietnam. This paper uses the Probit and Logit regression approach to estimate the impact of factors, affecting the disbursement probability of a loan of an enterprise. The number of SMEs accounts for 56.69% of the samples. The number of enterprises, applying for a bank loan accounts for 58.4% of the total samples, of which the percentage of disbursed loans for SMEs accounts for only 47.3%. For enterprises without a bank loan, eliminating the reasons for the lack of demand and unwish to be in debt, the main reasons not to access bank loans are high interest rates, complicated loan procedures and insufficient collateral.Results.The results obtained from the Logistic and Probit models show that the estimated coefficients are statistically significant, affecting the probability of taking a business loan, accepted by financial institutions. Although the coefficients, estimated from Logistics model are larger than those estimated from the Probit model, the estimated results show that the direction of impact of the variables in two estimation techniques gives quite similar results.Conclusion.Based on the results of this study, the Government of Vietnam should implement policies to support SMEs in the direction of improving their access to capital. The credit institutions should design products and services suitable to the characteristics of SMEs in Vietnam.