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Perceptions Of Business Challenges Facing Malaysian Smes: Some Preliminary Results, Ali S. Saleh, Peter Caputi, Charles Harvie

Charles Harvie

This paper develops an instrument to measure perceptions of business barriers facing small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) based upon a sample of 138 Malaysian businesses. An exploratory factor analysis yields five key factors covering: perception of government policies; perception of human capital; perception of availability of infrastructure; perception of business competition; and perception of financial issues. Reliability and item analyses provide support for the internal consistency of the factors and the discriminatory power of items that constitute the factors. In particular, this study finds that perceptions of government policies and infrastructure availability have the highest mean scores, suggesting that …