Identifying Existence Barriers in Small and Medium Size Enterprises Development (Herat Industrial Town, Afghanistan as a Case Study)

Abstract

Small and medium enterprises are among the most effective factors in the growth and development of economic and social systems of any country. These companies account for about 80 percent of Afghanistan's business and half of the country's gross domestic product. However, a large part of the labor force in Afghanistan is engaged in these enterprises. The present study has identified the most important obstacles in the development of small and medium size enterprises. Due to the small size of the statistical population, which includes 440 units in the industrial town of Herat, Krejci and Morgan table have been used to determine the sample size. Thus, the statistical sample size of 205 companies is considered. Exploratory factor analysis has been used to identify the factors and in the next step, confirmatory factor analysis has been performed to confirm the model obtained from the structural equation method. A questionnaire was used to collect the required data. In order to identify the obstacles of small and medium-sized companies, the opinions of 30 managers and experts of the relevant executive bodies and professors of universities in the city who had sufficient
information on the subject were used. Then the questionnaire was made and its validity also examined. Cronbach’s alpha method was used to test the reliability of the questionnaire which was equal to 0.91, which is a statistically acceptable coefficient. in this study, SPSS24 software was used to analyze the data at the level of exploratory factor analysis and Smart PLS3.0 software was used to analyze the data in the inferential statistics section, which includes fitting the measurement model, fitting the structural model and testing the research hypotheses. The results showed that the most important barriers to the development of small and medium enterprises are Organizational costs, as well as the Lack of proper infrastructure and new technology.