The OECD Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs Scoreboard: 2025 Highlights tracks financing trends, conditions and policy developments across nearly 50 countries. The paper provides official data on SME financing from 2007 to 2023, with additional insights for 2024 and early 2025, covering debt, equity, asset-based finance and overall financing conditions.
It shows that SMEs continue to face a restrictive financing environment, with high interest rates and economic uncertainty leading to sharp declines in SME lending. Other financing sources, such as factoring and leasing, also showed weak performance, while venture capital investments fluctuated across markets and sectors.
The shift towards smaller-scale, short-term financing for immediate needs, to the detriment of longer-term investments, documented in the paper has implications for investment, productivity, competitiveness and resilience. Governments are responding with a range of measures, including a focus on SME competitiveness and targeted support for strategic sectors like green and deep-tech industries.
