SMEs FINANCING: PATTERNS AND INFLUENCES

This study aims to shed more light on the issues of financing small and medium enterprises (SMEs), by means of the analysis of patterns and relationships that characterize SMEs, relevant sources of their financing and determinants of their financing decisions. In this respect, cluster analysis was used to investigate the existence of significant differences between European countries in terms of SMEs’ financing. Besides, the paper analyses the impact of financing sources and various determinant factors on the initiation, development and solving of financial problems of SMEs by means of fixed effects panel linear regression models. The results obtained largely confirm authors' expectations, highlighting significant differences between the clusters and the significant influence of the relevance of bank credit, internal sources of financing, government grants and internationalization of the economy on the initiation, development and solving of financial problems of SMEs