Emprendimiento y Gestión de Organizaciones

Several studies on corporate financing highlight the difficult access of SMEs to credit from formal financial institutions. Thus, in addition to these studies, the objective is set to assess how the attributes of social capital can assist the partnership between SMEs and financial institutions and thus facilitate access to credit. Specifically, it aims to test, among various other variables, the effect of social capital in terms of lending to SMEs.

Based on data from a sample of 50 companies registered in the directories of industrial companies, drawn by proportional stratified drawing and reasoned choice and processed using descriptive statistics and multiple regressions using a model Log it inspired from previous studies. It is observed that, on the one hand, relationship, honest, social trust are the major components of apprehension of social capital among entrepreneurs in the city of Gafsa; on the other hand, the variables gender, household size and social confidence of the entrepreneur are those justifying access to credit in this city.

This work analyses the personal, associative, institutional, and professional relationship networks in which the entrepreneur is involved and the resources embedded therein, and it proposes that an entrepreneur's social capital resources are determinants of his/her business' economic performance. The effect of social capital resources is moderated by the entrepreneur's experience. A questionnaire survey and a quota sample of 410 small- and medium-sized firms in Tunisia were used to test the proposed hypotheses. Results show that economic performance is influenced more by institutional and professional network resources than by the other network resources. However, the entrepreneur's experience in the sector reinforces the impact of professional and institutional resources.