Small business

3.5 Establishing an SME development and policy co-ordinating agency
Objective: To set up a separate department of government or an autonomous agency charged with the overall
management of SME policy and programmes.  
This goes beyond the advocacy and communication role described earlier. Over the past three decades,
countries all over the world have experimented with a variety of approaches to managing the development
of the SME sector. The main models are:
• A special department (usually) within a Ministry of Industry, Trade and Commerce;
• An autonomous state agency, often also tasked with overseeing regional support structures;
• An independent agency in which the private sector plays a key role.
EFFECTIVE POLICIES FOR SMALL BUSINESS - © OECD 2004
3. Policy Management
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The Small Business Administration of the United States created Small Business Development Centres (SBDCs)
throughout the country funded in partnership with state governments and the private sector to deliver a range of federal and
local programmes.
In Poland the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development (PARP), was established in 2000 as a successor to the Polish
Foundation for Small and Medium-size Enterprise which created the basic support infrastructure for SME support after the
abolishment of central planning. With an emphasis on SME, PARP provides advisory, promotional, training and financial
services and also gathers and disseminates information relevant to business development. PARP’s supervisory board members
represent the ministries responsible for the economy and for regional development as well as national business associations. 
Major forms of support (information, counselling, training, finance, incubation and provision of premises)
are often subcontracted to private sector associations, because the major lesson from international
experience is that state owned and state funded organisations, important as they may be for the overall
management of SME development strategy, are not the best way of delivering services to SMEs. The various
ways of delivering these are discussed in Chapter 5.

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