台灣及哥倫比亞之微型與中小企業融資保證計劃

Abstract

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), regardless of their business nature or location, have usually experienced a great difficulty in getting access to financial instruments. For years, governments have designed policies that attempt to bridge the existing inequality between what financial institutions offer and the possibilities of SMEs to gain access to such offerings. One important government-initiated mechanism is the loan guarantee program, which in essence, offers credit guarantee to those SMEs that lack the necessary collateral to support their loan applications. Past studies have examined the SMEs’ finance access strategies, either encouraged by the government or the private sector or there have been papers that investigated the entire set of government policies that assist SMEs. This thesis, as never been conducted before, looks specifically at one mechanism, the credit loan guarantees, and their operation in one Asian and one Latin American nation. This work looks at the guarantee programs in Colombia and Taiwan; it includes a description of how the two systems operate and it provides a comparison between the two. In addition, this study explores how the banking system in Colombia is changing not only in order to respond to the needs of SMEs but also because the SME lending market has opened new profit possibilities for financial institutions. Moreover, as a response to recent economical events, this study examines the outlook of both, the Taiwanese and Colombian guarantee programs by briefly looking at the major effects of the 2008 financial crisis on SME lending and the two mentioned guaranteed programs.