Formal Credit and SME Performance: Reviewing Evidence from Impact Evaluations

This paper reviews the impact evaluation evidence on how expanding formal credit affects small and medium enterprise (SME) performance, focusing on developing countries, particularly Latin America, while using evidence from advanced economies to sharpen mechanisms and external validity. Across the core evidence base, the meta-analytic mean effects of formal loans are economically meaningful: employment rises by about 12% on average, sales by about 18%, and profits by about 18%, albeit with substantial heterogeneity across settings, programs, and outcome horizons. The effects are larger in some large-scale public interventions and in programs explicitly targeting constrained firms but smaller or statistically indistinguishable from zero in others. Taken together, the evidence supports the view that relaxing financial constraints can raise SME scale and performance, but it also underscores that credit expansions are not automatically welfare improving, can create distributional and competitive spillovers, and are sensitive to program design, targeting, and local financial architecture.