President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) Timothy Tucker has lamented that medium-sized businesses often get left behind because they are not small enough to benefit from governmental support neither are they big enough to gain easy access to banking capital.
“Medium businesses suffer more than anyone else, because they are in that unique place where they’re not small enough to get government help, but they’re not big enough to have easy access to capital in the banking system, so it its unique place for medium businesses in the country,” Tucker contended.
According to Tucker, medium-scale businesses are important to an economy and he called for issues facing them to be addressed.
“Medium businesses today are your large businesses tomorrow, and so we need help…The Government has put the Small Business Bureau in play, that helps the micro and the really small businesses. But that segment where you’re now coming out of ‘small business’ and your medium, that’s the biggest problem…that’s the one where you get all the complaints,” he explained.
Tucker contended that support for these categories of businesses is not readily forthcoming and it is something he hopes can be addressed promptly.
A 2018 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Report had documented that most businesses in Guyana are small and medium sized (SME) and that they operate in a less than auspicious business climate, and their failure rate is high.
The IDB Report noted that two of the reasons that financial intermediaries are reluctant to grant credit to SMEs are the perceived higher risk of failure and lack of adequate collateral.
