Funding MSMEs in North Africa and Microfinance: The Issue of Demand and Supply Mismatch

A pooled sample of 3,075 Micro, Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) is designed as for Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia from the World Bank Enterprises Survey (WBES) as of 2013. The adjusted sample complies with international standards, although it does not remove all the biases encapsulated within the WBES. A subsample of 709 MSMEs applied for a loan on the demand side, including those that were granted a loan on the supply side and those that were rejected by financial institutions. The absence of Financial inclusion and lack of Collateral are the main reasons for this imbalance. A binary logit model including interaction variables addresses both the demand and the supply side. Salient findings on the demand side are that the characteristics of MSMEs -Size, Age, Registration and Financial inclusion influence loan demand, whereas the characteristics of managers and the Interest rate have no impact. Conversely, the characteristics of MSMEs play no role upon loan supply, whereas Financial inclusion and Collateral exert a major impact on the supply side. There is a mismatch as for loan supply from microfinance according to the microfinance industry vs. the WBES data source.