Small and Medium-sized enterprises in an era of globalisation: the cases of Europe, Latin America and Asia

This chapter provides an overview of recent SME policies in both developed and developing countries, focusing on the cases of three world regions, namely Europe, Latin America and Asia. We show that policies are rather specific in their implementation, owing to differences in history, in social and political context and in both tangible and intangible resources. However, some general trends can be outlined, such as the focus of policy in SME networking and on support of internationalisation