Business Support Services Working Group Evaluation Booklet (NEFI - Network of European Financial Institutions for SMEs)
Summary
- The Business Support Services Group brings together SME support agencies operating across 4 countries on 2 continents.p.13
- Almi employs 500 staff across 40 Sweden locations to provide subsidized advisory services, loans, and venture capital.p.14
- BDC operates as a development bank with 2 100 employees and total assets of CAN$22 906 000 thousand.p.15
- Bpifrance manages total assets of €63 834 000 thousand and employs 2 500 staff to assist French companies.p.16
- Bpifrance's Hub offers 1,000m² of dedicated space at its premises to foster innovation.p.16
- Enterprise Ireland oversees total assets of €325,000 thousand with a team of 730 employees.p.17
Key insights
- Operational teams focused on beneficiary volumes may resist devoting time to evaluation data collection.p.4
- Effective evaluations rely on a triptych of an external coordinator, involved administrations, and independent experts.p.5
- Time lags between program delivery and observable economic impact must be anticipated by program managers.p.6
- Tracking information on failed applicants provides a vital counterfactual population for impact comparison.p.8
- Data cleansing is critical as final evaluation outcomes depend directly on how well data errors are corrected.p.9
- Combining matching with difference in difference methods helps reduce selection bias in non-randomized settings.p.10
- Phase-in designs permit randomly delaying support for some firms so they can serve as control groups for early recipients.p.11
- Evaluating non-financial firm support is harder because it relies on qualitative, subjective metrics like customer satisfaction.p.12
Topics and entities
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