Access to formal credit and the success of micro, small, and medium enterprises in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia

Abstract

Micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) have an important role in Indonesia economy with the share in the numbers of the firms reaches 99.99 percent. Central Sulawesi is one of province in Indonesia which also has many MSMEs engaged in agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. Access to credit is one of major problems hampering MSMEs development in Central Sulawesi since only 39.33 percent of MSMEs in the research area which had access to credit in 2001-2007. This research is aimed to analyze the determinant of access to formal credit of non-agricultural MSMEs in Central Sulawesi and to determine the role of access to credit to the success of MSMEs. We use panel data from household’s survey of STORMA project in 2001, 2004, and 2007. There are two models are used in this research namely logit model (non-linear panel data model) and OLS model (linear panel data model). Each models are extended by panel data models i.e. pooled, population average (Pa), fixed effects (FE), and random effects (RE) model. Based on the evaluation of the four models and the result of the Hausman specification test for the FE and RE model, we decided to use random effects model for both analysis. Econometrics results from random effects show that the significance factors influencing access to credit are education, value of asset, and age of the owners. Whilst the result from random effects OLS model proves that formal credit limit has positive roles in the success of MSMEs in Sulawesi Tengah. On the other hand, informal credit limit is not statistically significance influencing the profit because of the inability of the informal lenders to provide amounts of credit as needed by the firms. Besides the formal credit limit, other variables which also significantly influence MSMEs’s profit are age of the owners and main Income from business.