Access to Financing as a Barrier to Trade: Evidence From Mauritius

Access to credit is essential for the development and growth of firms. For a small open economy like Mauritius, the ability of firms to enter export markets is essential for their growth and development, given that the size of the local market is quite limited. To increase sales and profitability, firms have to export. However, there are several costs that are involved when firms enter an export market. In many cases, finance becomes an essential factor that influences firms’ ability to export. These authors investigate whether the main constraint that firms in Mauritius face is access to finance and try to understand how firms overcome financial barriers. Given the limitations of existing methods to estimate financing constraints directly from firm-level accounting data, the results based on survey data are an important contribution in improving understanding of firms’ financing obstacles to exporting and how they overcome these barriers.     

Access to Financing in a Small Island Economy: Evidence From Mauritius

This relationship between access to financing and firm characteristics was studied. The authors used data from a survey of small and medium-sized enterprises from Mauritius, an island economy that is part of the sub-Saharan African continent. They examined the factors that affect the ability of firms to gain access to financing. Using the principal component analysis, the authors group variables affecting access to financing in four main components including working capital constraint, the external constraint, the size constraint, and the age constraint. The authors show that these components are important factors that influence the ability of firms to gain access to financing.