Various Aspects to Consider with Regard to Special Insolvency Rules for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The notion of special insolvency rules for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has attracted attention in international spheres, and within the ambit of some international and comparative approaches, same is considered in this article with particular focus on the South African position. In particular, we show that the South African insolvency regime does not, at present, cater for financially distressed small businesses in a specific and viable manner. In South Africa, although attention has been paid to the development and support of small businesses, similar considerations have not been observed with regard to the insolvency side of small business concerns. No comprehensive and focused process of dealing with financially distressed small businesses exists in the South African insolvency framework. This scenario prevails, notwithstanding that there are existing foreign and international policy guidelines, rules and regimes in developed jurisdictions that can serve as pointers in this regard. The purpose of this article is to first highlight the need for special treatment of small businesses by focusing on the shortcomings in the South African system, and, as a natural sequential development, policy proposals as unavoidable foundations to address these shortcomings. In the premises, the focus is on the principles and policies that are relevant to any discussion regarding insolvent businesses that fall within the scope of the SME category. Therefore, this paper deals with the concept of the small business, the South African insolvency regime and the international position pertaining to small businesses. In particular, the need for special treatment of SMEs under insolvent circumstances is discussed, consideration is given to the existing South African mechanisms available to small businesses in distress and the lack of suitable contextual provisions for small businesses in distress is noted. A core component of this article is the position in South Africa viewed against the backdrop of some international developments, international documents and principles that are relevant to an insolvency and rescue/rehabilitation regime within the context of the small business. As a logical conclusion, recommendations for reform of the South African regime are made. Copyright © 2015 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".