Inter-firm Linkages, Creditworthiness and Access to Finance

SMEs, particularly in the manufacturing industry, reportedly face difficulties in accessing funds to finance their capital expenditure and working capital. The various challenges that SMEs face in their access to finance could be eased via the capital market, government financial support and inter-firm linkages. This study aims to explore the roles of inter-firm linkages and their influence on improving Malaysian SME access to finance and its creditworthiness (measured by 5C's of credit). This study uses quatitative analysis and Partial Least Squared (PLS) method was employed as the statistical tool to analyze the data. PLS-SEM multigroup analysis (PLS-MGA) is used to analyze the moderating effect of the model path. SPSS software was required only in complimenting for Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) while SmartPLS was the main software used for the entire data analysis. The result shows that there is a significant relationship between SME creditworthiness and its access to finance. The moderating role of inter-firm linkages towards the relationship between creditworthiness and access to finance is also found to be insignificant.