Financial Instruments for Boosting Entrepreneurship in Selected Post-Communist EU Countries

The EU policy strives to smooth the huge differences in the development of entrepreneurship by allowing convergence regions to use a portion of the EU funds with other financial instruments to spur the competitiveness and economic growth. It does it via three mechanisms: grants from the ESI funds within the Cohesion policy that are accessed via national calls for application; local financial intermediaries that offer lower interest rates for certain programmes by help of the European Investment Bank and/or European Investment Fund, and by applying directly for the programmes managed by the European Commission. Besides the specific types of the available EU funds and the main aim of their usage, the operational programmes contribution to boosting the competitiveness of the new EU member states have not been widely researched. It is mostly due to the late evaluation results of certain programme achievements that spread years ahead of the programmes’ closure. The purpose of this chapter is to present the variety of financing schemes available to SMEs and the importance of public policy for SME development.