The State Support for small and Medium Sized Companies: General and Practical Aspects of Lithuania

The purpose of this paper is to identify development possibilities of small and medium sized business in Lithuania. The analysis includes the discussion of the peculiarities of state financial support in Lithuania. The major forms of state support, such as tax exemptions; financial support: credits on easy terms, total or partial covering of interest rate, guarantee reassurance and sponsion, credit insurance, risk venture capital investments in SME, compensation of some expenditures (such as firm establishment, researches, guarantee taxes, credit insurance fees, quality certification and etc.), subsidies for the creation of workplaces; easy term consultations, trainings, qualification improvement and re-skilling for firms owners and employees and employers; business incubators, business centers, technological parks and their offered services: INVEGA (SCS Investment and business Guarantees), SME Development Funds are presented. Some other national, county and municipal support forms are defined. As the opportunities of this paper are rather limited and don't allow to evaluate SMEs position on Lithuanian level, Kaunas county was selected with the hope that through the survey results it could be possible to understand the common tendencies for SMEs in Lithuania. The next section presents the research of Kaunas district SME, which helped to identify the main problems of this sector and allow foreseeing some possible methods for the current situation improvement. The last part is devoted to the project of intensification of SME development possibilities. The major attention was devoted to SME development promoting measures that does not require large financial investments and satisfy SME need presented in the survey.