ACCESS TO FINANCE PERCEIVED AS AN OBSTACLE AND THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SMME AND ITS OWNER: EVIDENCE FROM THE FREE STATE GOLDFIELDS – SOUTH AFRICA
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The firm-financing gap is a term commonly used to describe the lack of access to finance encountered by enterprises. Insufficient finance is a major impediment to corporate expansion, and small firms face greater challenges than larger firms in acquiring credit. It is vital to investigate the factors that may become an obstacle in accessing finance by SMMEs. Therefore, this study investigates whether access to finance is perceived as an obstacle based on the characteristics inherent to SMMEs and their owners in the Matjhabeng municipality in the Free State Goldfields in South Africa. A survey strategy is used in the current study. Using a sample of 364 SMMEs, three regression analyses are run. The results indicate that SMMEs in the start-up phase of their life cycle are more likely to perceive access to finance as an obstacle. This is exacerbated when SMMEs do not keep financial records and do not own immovable property. SMMEs thus need to continuously demonstrate their capacity to formally document the actual performance of the business. These entities further need to prioritise building assets that can be pledged as collateral.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it