Social capital in bank loan agreements to SMEs
Perceived as one of the main constraints to growth and development, access to credit remains an up to date issue in the design of policies aiming at the promotion and framing of SMEs. Often, SMEs are not only characterized by a flaw management process, sometimes they are incapable to provide-elements of collaterals fitting the requirements of banks. Social capital is more and more referred to as an instrument likely to reduce the transaction costs of banks in their monitoring process over their clients and, consequently it is seen as having a high potential of lessening the disadvantages associated to informational asymmetries. Therefore, building on a context of high information asymmetries, this study examines the aptitude of social capital to facilitate access to banking credit for Cameroonian SMEs. Based on a sample of 413 SMEs, a multinomial Logit model confirms a positive and significant effect of the index of social capital in the explanation of access to credit, irrespective of the term of the credit. Globally, the aptitude of social capital to ease the constraint of access to credit passes through the fact that, for the bankers, it serves as a factor that reduces the degree of opacity in the management of SMEs.