Finance and growth nexus in Russia: Does the SMEs channel matter?

The paper presents the results of an analysis of the relationship between financial and economic development in Russian regions. The authors focus on one of the transmission channels of this relationship - the channel of small and medium--sized enterprises (SMEs). The issue of the SMEs' dependence on the access to credit in the literature is generally considered separately from the issue of the impact of small business on economic dynamics. In this study, both issues are combined in one chain of the theoretical analysis and are examined with the help of an econometric model using credit depth measures as instrumental variables. To track the SMEs' development, three variables were defined to characterize the size of the SME sector, the share of SMEs in the structure of the private sector, and the operational efficiency of small enterprises. Our data refer to the subjects of RF and cover the period from 2008 to 2019. The results confirm the Russian SMEs sector's ability to act as a transmission channel from financial deepening to output growth. The most reliable variables are those characterizing the size of the SMEs sector in the region and the revenue of small firms per employee. Our findings support the conclusions made in a large number of works that provide evidence of the crucial importance of the conditions for access to external finance to raise the SMEs' performance. The results we obtained also confirm that it would be reasonable to put special emphasis on overcoming obstacles in the access of SMEs to external financing when they take initiatives to develop SMEs in the regions.