Irrespective of the location on the globe, I believe that the government support to SMEs can broadly be classified into - One shot support and Constant Support.
One shot support may be in the form of providing seed capital for starting up a business, and provided just once, and may have different variants and components depending upon the policy of the Government at that place.
Constant support may be in the form of rebates, subsidized inputs (and even subsidized finances), price floors, tax concessions, marketing and logistic support.
I think there are hundreds of programmes meant for SMEs, and may come with different flavors and variants, but I think we can classify them into the above mentioned broad categories.
Rothwell, R., & Zegveld, W. (1982). Innovation and the small and medium sized firm. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership Historical Research Reference in Entrepreneurship.
Bennett, R. J., & Robson, P. J. (1999). Intensity of interaction in supply of business advice and client impact: a comparison of consultancy, business associations and government support initiatives for SMEs. British Journal of Management, 10(4), 351-369.
As stated above by Khaki, government across the world have a number of initiatives to support SMEs along the life cycle - i.e there are specific scheme to encourage and support start-up and firms which move along the growth path. For example, there are funding scheme which encourage SMEs to expand their business and also to capture the export market.
SMEs are also given financial support to participate in trade fair locally and abroad.
There are government agencies that dispense training in a number of areas to ensure that SMEs have the required skills to manage the business efficiently.
The list goes on and in Mauritius, the government is also envisaged to set up an SME bank.
Dear Enis. In a broad sense there are 3 types of financial instrument (FI) that governments (and supra-national agencies) can use to promote the flow of capital to SMEs; (1) grants, (2) soft loans or loan guarantees, and (3) equity based. The choice of FI should take into account (a) the composition of the stock of SMEs and latent entrepreneurs, (b) the nature of capital constraints (i.e short-term credit, longer-term debt, or risk capital), (c) the number of firms of good quality who are capital constrained, (d) the precise scale of funding that is most difficult for firms to access (e.g for debt it may be micro loans (