What Have We Learned from the Enterprise Surveys Regarding Access to Credit by SMEs?

Using a unique firm level data set—the Enterprise Surveys—this paper develops a new measure of credit-constrained status for firms using hard data instead of perceptions data. The paper classifies firms into four ordinal categories: Not Credit Constrained, Maybe Credit Constrained, Partially Credit Constrained, and Fully Credit Constrained to understand the characteristics of the firms that fall into each group.