Obstacles and Opportunities for Development of Family Businesses: Experiences from Moldova

Abstract

The chapter examines the processes of formation and development of small family enterprises, as in Moldova, the family business is created and developed mainly as micro and small enterprises. Since the activity of family businesses is not legally regulated and is not considered by the statistics in the Republic of Moldova, primarily the results of surveys and interviews with entrepreneurs, conducted by the authors during the realization of international projects and studies carried out in the National Institute for Economic Research of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova in the period 2001–2013 served the basis for writing this material. The chapter describes the barriers for family businesses, conditioned by their access to certain types of resources and other limiting factors from the external environment. Simultaneously, additional opportunities of the family SMEs are observed, arising through cooperation of the efforts and resources of family members, which allows increasing the assets of family businesses and partly compensating the shortcomings of the activity of business support institutes.