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This article examines access to finance for SMEs in the Baltic States and the South Caucasus countries following the financial crisis of 2007 and is set within the context of the rule of law for businesses.

The article uses the cross-sectional dataset from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) for 2009 to examine access to finance for SMEs and the court system in the Baltic States and the South Caucasus countries. An ordered probit estimation technique is used to model access to finance and the court system in the Baltic States and the South Caucasus countries. The analysis draws upon institutional theory to explain access to finance for SMEs.

The results show variations from one Baltic State and South Caucasus country to another in relation to fairness, speed of justice and enforcement of court decisions. The analysis suggests that if access to finance is not an obstacle to business operations and the court system is fair, impartial and uncorrupted, it determines the likelihood of strength in entrepreneurship. Additionally, the results show that, within the Baltic region, businesses experiencing constraints in accessing finance are more likely to have females as their top managers. However, for the South Caucasus region, there was no gender difference.

This research is based on evidence from the Baltic States and the South Caucasus region. However, the findings are relevant to discussions on the importance of the context of entrepreneurship, and more specifically, the rule of law. The institutional theory provides an explanation for coercive, normative and mimetic institutional isomorphism in the context of access to finance for SMEs. Coercive institutional isomorphism exerts a dependence on access to finance for SMEs. In coercive institutional isomorphism, formal and informal pressures are exerted by external organisations such as governments, legal regulatory authorities, banks and other lending institutions. These formal and informal pressures are imposed to ensure compliance as a dependency for successful access to finance goal.

This research creates awareness among entrepreneurs, potential entrepreneurs, business practitioners and society that reducing obstacles to access finance and a fair court system improve entrepreneurial venture formation. This has the potential to create employment, advance business development and improve economic development.

This paper makes an original contribution by emphasising the significance of access to finance and a fair court system in encouraging stronger entrepreneurship. The institutional framework provides a definition for coercive institutional isomorphism to show how external forces exert a dependence pressure towards access to finance for SMEs.

The history of Circassian diaspora by expressing experiences of Syrian Circassians with oppression and resistance was informed by Archer’s three-stage cycle in the context of analytical structure-agency dualism leading to social change. In the last period, Turkish Circassians’ political awakening in the name of “return to homeland” overlaps the last forced migration experience of Syrian Circassians. As a matter of fact, return to the homeland is nothing but a return to the past and a call to account for solidarity in the diaspora. Therefore, the new refugee experience of Syrian Circassians has strengthened social construction of return to the past and recalled a search for reassessing their past. But, more importantly, it shows transnational solidarity of diasporic subjects beyond nation-states.

This chapter examines the impoverishment process in three South Caucasian states: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. It uses the concept of ‘order of curtailment’ of consumption expenditures to detect the order of curtailment of expenditures in the Caucasus region. It then suggests computing poverty rates on the basis of a threshold corresponding to the curtailment of a certain number of consumption expenditures categories and compares the poverty rates obtained with those derived from more traditional approaches to the unidimensional measurement of poverty. The empirical illustrations are based on the Caucasus Barometer surveys of 2009 and 2013.

The purpose of this paper is to explore public attitudes towards poor people in the South Caucasian countries.

The paper is based on an analysis of data from the tenth round of the Caucasus Barometer survey, one of the most reliable sources of public opinion data in the region.

The majority of the population in Azerbaijan and Georgia would consent to paying higher taxes or reducing public services if their governments used the extra resources to provide cash assistance to more poor people, but in Armenia the level of solidarity is considerably lower. However, the majority in each of the countries supports assistance being conditional on beneficiaries actively searching for work. In contrast to conventional wisdom, some better-off groups are more in favour of supporting the poor than those who face a higher risk of poverty. The author hypothesises that this may be driven by self-interest, as in relative terms the welfare sacrifices required for financing the extension of schemes might be higher for the vulnerable than for the better-off.

This paper is the first to provide a comparative analysis of public attitudes towards vulnerable groups in the South Caucasus. It also contributes to the scarce literature on perceived welfare deservingness of social assistance recipients and public preferences for imposing conditionality on them. In addition, it presents a strong case for using more comprehensive questions to construct measurements of people’s welfare attitudes than those commonly used.