文献信息：
文献标题：The Effect of Business Environment and Entrepreneurs’ Gender on Perception of Financial Risk in The Smes Sector（商业环境和企业家性别对中小企业财务风险感知的影响）
国外作者：Kozubíková Ludmila, Homolka Lubor, Kristalas Dimitris 文献出处：《Journal of Competitiveness》, 2017, 8(1):36-50 字数统计：英文2905单词，15898字符；中文4887汉字
外文文献：
The Effect of Business Environment and Entrepreneurs’ Gender on Perception of Financial Risk in The Smes Sector
AbstractSmall and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are crucial, and not only for the Czech economy. Their sustainable growth is important for the economy of most European countries. Because of this, the issues surrounding their financing, government support and public perception are widely discussed. The problems connected with external financing of SMEs are closely related to effective management of financial risk, which can minimize competition, create better financial structure and increase the firm’s competitiveness. Our results of the questionnaire surveyin the Czech Republic in 2015 were obtained using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) and revealed a factor which the male sample believed to be an important influence on the perception of financial risk is a bank’s approach to business. This factor is significantly influenced by knowledge, rules and principles including the knowledge of banks’ credit conditions, their transparency and the ability of entrepreneurs to manage financial risks. In the female sample, state and public perception showed to be much more important in the perception of financial risk. Male entrepreneurs mitigate financial risks through a bank’s assistance whereas female entrepreneurs emphasize the role of society.
Keywords:small and medium-sized enterprises, financial risk, government support, social environment, banks’ approach, Czech Republic
1.INTRODUCTION
Filser, Eggers, Kraus and Málovics (2014) state that the increasing pressure from globalization on today’s firms makes it hard to develop enduring competitive advantages, and improve business performance or create sustainable competitive advantage, which are cornerstones of any firm’s viability. The results of their study comparing SMEs in Austria and Hungary show that availability of financial resources promote entrepreneurial orientation and SME growth as a result. Furthermore, financial resource availability in general has a significantly positive effect on firm growth. Their study shows that the more financial resources an SME possesses, the more likely it is to be “entrepreneurially oriented,” and the more it grows as a result. Therefore, any firm that intends to grow will require entrepreneurial orientation.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the Czech economy, as evidenced by the statistics. For the successful development of small and medium-sized enterprises it is important to create a suitable strategic and institutional framework to support the successful development of appropriate business conditions (Sobotovi?ová & Blechová, 2016). According tothe Czech Statistical Office, data showed business activity of 1124380 SMEs run by legal and natural persons (employing 0-249 persons) on the 31st December 2014. The SMEs proportion of the total number of active enterprises in 2014 was 99.84 %. Its proportion of employees in the business sector in the Czech Republic in 2014 amounted to 59.39 %. The added value of SMEs to the whole of the Czech Republic accounted for 53.11 %. (Ministry of Industry and Trade, 2015)
SMEs are crucial to competitiveness and productivity; they seem to be better built for survival and may even thrive in a changing and integrated environment. For most of the small firms, the key question is how to finance new entrepreneurial plans. Banks look for a positive company track record and collateral, which generally new firms do not have, particularly those developing knowledge-based activities. Access to
finance is the most important constraint in the view of the entrepreneurs. The smaller the firm, the more important the difficulty of financing the new entrepreneurial plans becomes (Samitas & Kenourgios, 2005).
Because of these facts, it is necessary to pay attention to risk management of SMEs and due to existing obstacles with external financing, it is necessary to concentrate on the financial risk associated with financing: financial transactions that include company loans at risk of default.
2.THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Shuying and Mei (2014) argue that financial risk is one of the major reasons for default of SMEs due to lack of bank financing. Similarly, it is argued that managing financial risk can minimize the competition, by improving better financial structure and increasing production ability. Itis also identified that poor capital structure of SMEs is a major reason for their financial risk. SMEs are overwhelmingly dependent on debt financing and as a result their debt ratio is higher in the capital. Therefore, banks charge higher interest rates and due to large debt burden, SMEs default. Hence, the authors propose that effective management of capital structure can reduce debt burden, which in turn may also reduce the financial risk of the SMEs.
Kim and Vonorts (2014) examined risk management practices for young and small firms, those between two-eight years, operating in ten European countries: Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Sweden and the UK. They found that when young firm is faced with technological risk, financial risk and operational risk, it engages in networking activities from which they seek help from others. Moreover, the results show that technological and financial risk is highly associated with networking and that small firms can arrange funds to run their operation smoothly when faced with a financial crisis. Nevertheless, two thirds of the respondents replied that market risk is the major risk for the survival of their enterprise (i.e., high competition, low demand for the product, advancement of new designs, narrow market place for selling their products, etc.). Financial risk management and lack of access to funds is also found to be a very significant for risk
management in small firms: around 60% of the respondents think managing aftermarket risk and financial risk is important for their survival.
Korab and Pomenkova (2014) examined the access of SMEs to credit in the Visegrad countries during the period of financial crisis, and they found that SMEs in the Czech Republic and Slovakia show greater reduction in loans and they had very limited access to finance betweenthe pre-crisis period of 2006-2007 to 2008-2009. However, the changes in Poland and Hungary are insignificant. It shows that these countries were affected more than Poland and Hungary during the period of financial crisis. It is also possible to say that banks in these countries were even more conservative in providing loans to SMEs after the financial crisis. Hence, SMEs face greater financial constraints in these countries to raising funds for their growth.
For most small and medium-sized enterprises, bank credit is the most common and often the only external source of funds. The results of a Bsiness Environment and Enterprise perfomance Survey of Muravyev, Talavera and Schafer (2007), which included 34 countries mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, show that women entrepreneurs are more creditrationed than the male entrepreneurs. Banks are discriminating based on gender: women received nearly 5 % lower credits than males in the examined countries. Similarly, the results show that banks charged 0,5 percentage points more on interest rates and demanded higher collateral from the women entrepreneurs. However, they also found that financial development of the market can reduce the discrimination in bank financing, due to more information transparency and increased competition in the market. Overall, it is found that women face more credit constraints than their male counterparts and that banks′ approaches to financing is still too rigid for female entrepreneurs.
The results of Belluchi, Borisov and Zazzaro (2010), who examined the gender-based discrimination in bank financing in the Italian market using credit fie data from 7 800 small businesses, show that female entrepreneurs are faced with some strict conditions in the loan contract: higher collateral, lower credit limits and quicker maturity of the loan. They did not find any discrimination in the pricing of the loans and it suggests that similar interest rates are available for both men and women
entrepreneurs. It suggests that a bank′s approach to financing female-owned firms is more conservative than the male-owned firms because women entrepreneurs have a lack of management ability, experience and a lower academic level is than their male counterparts.
3.RESEARCH OBJECTIVE, METHODOLOGY, DATA
The aim of this article is to find out the character and the degree of dependency of determined factors, working title knowledge and rules and principles (KP), banks′ approaches to business (BA), state and public perception (SP) on the perception of financial risk (FR) between the male (861 respondents, 75 %) and female sample (280 respondents, 25 %) from the questionnaire survey conducted in the Czech Republic in 2015. At the same time, we tried to reveal the nature of the relationship between examined factors.
The companies were chosen from the database Albertina and in total of 1650 randomly selected firms were addressed by e-mail or phone to fill in the questionnaire placed at website. Data was collected in the 14 Czech regions. Although all regions in the Czech Republic were covered, 323 companies were asked in the Zlín region. This bias is caused by the location of the university which carried out the research.
The questionnaire consisted of 52 questions. In the first nine questions, the respondent was asked about their education, gender, age, residency, firm size, lenght of operation, area of conducting business, motives for starting a business and finally, the most important characteristics of entrepreneur were analyzed. The rest of the questions were scale questions on a 1-5 scale (1-totally agree, 2-agree 3-do not hold a position, 4-disagree, 5-completely disagree) and focused on five elements of entrepreneurial orientation.
The structure of the sample according to the business area was as follows: trade companies (33%), manufacturing companies (23%), construction companies (14%), transport companies (6%) and agricultural firms (3%). The largest portion of companies operated in other sectors (39%).
From the total number of 1,141 surveyed firms 65% were micro-enterprises, 27%