Microfinance, EU Structural Funds and Capacity Building for Managing Authorities A Comparative Analysis of European Convergence Regions

The work analyses trends and perspective of credit and finance for European Smes and analyses the EU credit access policy also during financial crisis . In the context of the financial crisis, microenterprises generally play a crucial role in furthering economic dynamism in the regional and national economic systems by stimulating competitiveness and productivity. Access to finance is a well-recognized problem, in the current context, and especially during the recovery from the economic downturn, access of microenterprises to finance has become even more difficult. In this perspective, the chapter reflects on the use of EU instruments to support microenterprises in gaining access to credit. One of the main targets of the European Commission is to improve the level of knowledge that european resource management authorities should possess on financial engineering instruments. The use of this instruments is an innovative way of spending the EU budget in addition to grants and subsidies