In most countries, the main financing source for local governments infrastructure projects comes from central government’s budget. However, considering growing urban population, this will be insufficient to meet likely increasing expenditures in future as it is now. Local must explore alternative methods, including accession capital markets. Nevertheless, governments, especially small and mediu...

The financial crisis has decreased the opportunities of small businesses to acquire financing through conventional financial actors, such as commercial banks. This credit constraint is partly the reason for the emergence of new alternatives of financing, in addition to the spreading opportunities for communication and secure financial transfer through Internet. One of the most interesting venue...

The evolving financial environment facing the corporate sector provides many non-bank external finance options as an alternative to bank finance and this paper examines the relationship between UK firms’ choices over bank versus non-bank finance under different monetary conditions. We look at the external finance 'mix' using a panel of 16,000 UK firm records taken from the FAME database for the...

Purpose: This paper explores some of the barriers faced by UK entrepreneurs in raising bank finance to support and grow their businesses, specifically the impact of personal characteristics (ethnicity, gender and education). Methodology/Approach: The approach adopted for the research was a telephone survey of 400 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) conducted by the Barclays Bank small bus...

Consumer finance has become one of the most important areas of banking both because of the amount of money being lent and the impact of such credit on the global economy and the realisation that the credit crunch of 2008 was partly due to incorrect modelling of the risks in such lending. This paper reviews the development of credit scoring,-the way of assessing risk in consumer finance-and what...

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