TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREAMBLE ... 11
CHAPTER 1: GENERAL INTRODUCTION ... 12
1. General context of the thesis ... 14
1.1 State of research on “SMEs and public policies” ... 14
1.2 Geographic and time context of the study ... 16
1.3 Description of the measures studied ... 17
1.4 Object of the study ... 19
2. Objectives and research question ... 25
3. Epistemological positioning of the thesis ... 26
CHAPTER 2: THE FOUNDATIONS AND EVALUATION METHODS OF SME PUBLIC POLICIES:A SYNTHETIC REVIEW OF LITERATURE ... 27
1. The foundations of SME public policies ... 29
1.1 Limits of liberalism as a way to explain SME policies ... 29
1.2 Governments’ will to achieve economic and social objectives through SMEs ... 31
1.3 Constraints faced by SMEs as a way to explain government assistance ... 32
1.4 The leverage effect exerted by assistance as a way of explaining public policies ... 35
2. The measures used by governments within the frame of direct assistance to SMEs ... 40
3. SME policy evaluation methods ... 48
3.1 General considerations in policy evaluation ... 49
3.2 Methodological requirements of policy evaluation ... 53
3.3 A review of the different evaluation methods ... 56
3.4 Examples of studies applying evaluation methods and the results obtained ... 79
4. DISCUSSION ... 88
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ... 90
1. The main concepts ... 91
1. Hypotheses of the study ... 914
3. Study design ... 102
4. Data collection ... 102
5. Data description ... 110
CHAPTER 4: RESULTS ... 122
Results of empirical Study 1:The effect of the type of measures used by Governments on the effectiveness of their intervention in the SME sector ... 123
1. Statistics on the variables of the study ... 124
2. Findings ... 127
Results of empirical Study 2: Public measures, Firms’ internal characteristics, and Government effectiveness in the SME sector ... 132
1. Descriptive statistics on the main variables of the study ... 133
2. Estimation results and interpretation ... 138
2.1 Analysis of the influence of the type of measures and the level of cash-flow ... 138
2.2 Analysis of the influence of the type of measures and the level of equity ... 140
2.3 Analysis of the influence of the type of measures and the level of debt ... 142
CHAPTER 5: GENERAL CONCLUSION ... 145
1. A reminder of the outlines of the thesis ... 147
2. Contributions of the thesis ... 149
2.1 Contributions on the empirical ground ... 149
2.2 Contribution on the theoretical ground ... 151
2.3 Contributions on the methodological ground ... 152
3. Limitations ... 153
4. Perspectives ... 155
REFERENCES ... 157
