Title: The patterns of financial bootstrapping behaviour empirical evidence from Swedish SMEs

Authors: Darush Yazdanfar

Addresses: Department of Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University, Regementsgatan 25-27, Ostersund 831 25, Sweden

Abstract: The aim of this study is to explore the patterns of financial bootstrapping behaviour of SMEs in Ostersund/Sweden. The present research is based on a structured questionnaire survey and focuses on a sample of 146 SMEs. |Financial bootstrapping| denotes a set of techniques such as reliance on internal funding sources, low-cost acquisition of financial resources, and avoidance of external financial resources. The empirical results show that the sample firms use a wide variety of bootstrapping techniques. In addition, although the internal resources and social oriented techniques emerged as the most- and second most highly used financial bootstrapping techniques respectively, other techniques such as minimising accounts receivable, minimising capital, and subsidy bootstrapping have been ranked as the most important bootstrapping techniques. The results from this study contribute to the understanding of informal financial behaviour of SMEs.

Keywords: small business finance; financial bootstrapping; capital stature; informal financial sources; Sweden; entrepreneurial finance; SMEs; SME finance; small and medium-sized enterprises.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBG.2011.042058

International Journal of Business and Globalisation, 2011 Vol.7 No.3, pp.255 - 264

Published online: 27 Sep 2014 *

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