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12/04/2012 - Small and medium-sized businesses are engines of economic growth, but access to finance remains one of the biggest challenges for their development and often their survival.

A new OECD report provides comparable data on financial conditions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across 18 countries during the financial and economic crisis from 2007 to 2010.
Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs: An OECD Scoreboard will be launched at a special conference on SME Finance at the OECD Conference Centre, Paris on 19 April 2012.

Speakers will include:

• H.R.H. Princess Máxima of the Netherlands, the UN Secretary General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development and Honorary Patron of the G20 Global Partnership on Financial Inclusion;
• Yves Leterme, OECD Deputy Secretary-General; and
• Salvatore Zecchini, Chair of the OECD Working Party on SMEs and Entrepreneurship.

The conference, which is open to the press, will include a round-table discussion: SME finance - advancing entrepreneurship and growth in a continuing crisis. Further details and agenda are available here.

To register for the conference, request interviews with speakers or obtain an advance copy of the report (under embargo until 11.00 a.m. Paris time on Thursday 19 April 2012), journalists are invited to contact the OECD’s Media Division (news.contact@oecd.org; tel +331 4524 8103).

The countries covered in the report include: Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Korea, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the UK, and the US.