Advancing enabling policy environments for inclusive businesses in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations

This report was prepared on request of the ASEAN Coordinating Committee on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (ACCMSME) by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (United Nations ESCAP) and the Inclusive Business Action Network (iBAN).Inclusive businesses provide goods, services, and livelihoods on a commercially viable basis, to people living at the base of the pyramid making them part of the value chain of companies as suppliers, distributors, retailers, or customers. Since ASEAN leaders in 2017 called for &ldquo;greater emphasis on creating an enabling environment for Inclusive Businesses in ASEAN Member States&rdquo; governments have started developing policies to encourage more inclusive businesses (IB) to emerge and scale-up. At the same time business leaders, the finance community and other key stakeholders have stepped up to the task of developing and scaling IB models for economic growth and social impact at scale. The time is now ripe to take stock of the progress made and map public-private collaborations that can further support IB in ASEAN.</p

Credit Surety Fund: A Credit Innovation for Micro, Small, and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Philippines

Micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises are a backbone of the Philippine economy. One factor that hinders the growth of these enterprises is their difficulty in accessing finance from banks and other financial institutions. The Credit Surety Fund (CSF) was established to help these enterprises and other organizations become creditworthy and bankable. The CSF is a credit guarantee program initiated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas that enables enterprises and cooperatives to gain easier access to loans from banks without providing collateral. The CSF pools contributions from cooperatives and nongovernment organizations, local government units, institutions such as the Development Bank of the Philippines, the Land Bank of the Philippines, the Industrial Guarantee and Loan Fund, and other organizations. In this way, it is a public-private partnership that links the key players of the economy to empower enterprises and cooperatives

Enterprises in the Philippines: Dynamism and Constraints to Employment Growth

This paper seeks to analyze the factors affecting the growth of enterprises in the Philippines, as measured from the expansion of employment. The paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it attempts to provide a comprehensive background of the various policies and legislations that affect firms in the country. Second, using micro-level data of the firms in 2009, we correlate the observed growth of these firms with reported constraints in the business environment within which these firms operate, to investigate which ones are binding constraints. We find significant correlations between a subset of these indicators of business climates and the issues raised in previous literature, and the effects vary across firms of different sizes. Given the challenging global climate in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, more than a third of these firms expanded their payroll and majority saw growth in real sales. Amidst a sea of subjective self-reported responses, we manage to find certain empirical regularities that withstand a battery of robustness checks. These correlations between a subset of indicators for business climates and the growth or expansion of firms may shed some light on future potential policies to assist these firms, as well as provide directions for further research