Enterprise assistance: responses from the public and private sectors

One of the consequences of the rising profile of the SME sector is that many countries have some sort of “enterprise assistance” programme. In some countries there are extensive government‐funded programmes, often delivered by a network of governmental agencies. However, increasingly the distinction between public and private sectors is irrelevant, with the emergence of a new option for clients: agencies that are publicly funded but which deliver their services using a model that has been drawn from the private sector. This has implications for the clients of such services, as well as the service providers themselves. In a number of countries where the “private sector” model is being adopted for the delivery of “public good” services, the agencies involved in designing the policies and delivering the programmes are facing considerable challenges in moving from one model to the other.