The Application of Generalized Additive Model in the Effectiveness of Scale in Funding Policy on SMEs Overall Performance

The aims of this study is to analyze the effectiveness of firms financial status quo and the scale of financial support on SMEs overall performance. We have gathered the financial guarantee data from 1998 to 2013, provided by Korea Credit Guarantee Fund (KODIT), to analyze the effectiveness of Financial policy. To classify both financial status quo and scale of financial support, we utilized the following variables; Interest Coverage Ratio (ICR) and newly guaranteed amount ratio. To take the measurement of the overall performance, we employed profitability, growth ratio and activity index. To minimize the effect of repeated financial support (redundancy benefits), firms were selected based on the following criteria: firms that receive no financial support prior to implementing such policy over the last 3 years and no new financial support over the last 2 years. Results suggest that firms with higher ICR and large newly guaranteed amount influence on financial performance in terms of profitability index. Firms with lower ICR and large scale financial support showed a better performance compare to firms with small-scale financial support. Firms with large-scale financial support, irrespective of ICR inclined to have better performance to those of small-scale financial support in terms of growth index. For activity index, however, firms with large scale support led to higher performance in the short term. In turn, our analysis presents objective perspective with respect to the effectiveness of financial policy through credit guarantee on overall performance of SMEs. This study, therefore, implies that well-balanced SMEs supporting policy may lead to better directions.