Empresários nanicos, garantias e acesso à crédito

We aim at contributing to the development of productive popular credit in Brazil. A step towards this direction is to decrease the informational asymmetry existing among managers of public policy and their target audience. The current paper benefits from the best available opportunity of exploring information about small businesses: the survey about Informal Urban Economics— ECINF, performed by the IBGE in 1997, where almost 50,000 self-employed and those employing up to five employees were interviewed. We describe from ECINF the forms of access to credit for these establishments. The micro-credit market reveals to be incipient in the country’s urban regions; only 7% of small businesses attained access to credit in the three months prior to the survey. We describe the pattern of correlation of productive credit use with other variables, in particular those connected to the ownership of real guarantees or social collateral’s in the Brazilian urban areas. The connection of some elements of social capital is correlated to the attainment of credit, where the advantage increase in 33% to those associated to some union, association, or co-operative in relation to those who do not have a linkage to these organizations. The question of legality also presents strong correlation to the attainment of credit: those with judicial constitution have an advantage 55% greater than those without. The variable indicative of the possession of machinery is also noticed; it is in this variable that we observe one of the greater values of estimate, where the advantage of those who use it is approximately twice larger in relation to those who do not use it. Performing this survey in a metropolitan region has little influence of the attainment of credit; the advantage is only 10% greater than that of the people in other urban areas. Overall, the results are consistent with the importance attributed in the literature by real guarantees and alternatives in the attainment of credit.